Pro-Tibet demonstrators carry a sign which reads, "Stop Genocide in Tibet" during an anti-China march in Paris to protest against the leg of the Olympic torch relay, yesterday. (REUTERS)

PARIS • Media rights activists Reporters Without Borders (RSF) were at the heart of pro-Tibet protests that cut short the Paris leg of the Beijing Olympic flame relay yesterday.

Worried officials extinguished the torch and placed it on the bus five times throughout the day as protesters tried to grab the torch and block the relay. At least two activists got almost an arm's length away before they were seized by police. Another protester threw water at the torch but failed to put it out before being taken away.

From the Champs-Elysees to the Eiffel Tower, RSF campaigners unfurled the same black banner showing the Olympic rings turned into handcuffs, in protest at China's rights record and its crackdown in Tibet.

In a spectacular coup, RSF head Robert Menard unfurled the flag over the door of Notre-Dame Cathedral yesterday afternoon-after scaling the building's sheer facade on Sunday night and remaining hidden inside, he said. Menard said he was helped by two professional mountaineers for the climb, which took more than three hours.

The RSF head has shot to international attention with his calls for a boycott of the opening ceremony of the games on August 8 and for his condemnation of China's crackdown on Tibetan protestors.

The rights group had promised "symbolic, spectacular" actions to mark the Olympic flame's passage through Paris, after disrupting the lighting of the flame in Athens last month. Menard had earlier denounced the security arrangements in Paris.

"All that is missing is an appeal to Parisians to stay at home along the lines established in Beijing, where only officials welcomed the Olympic torch on a Tiananmen Square emptied of passers-by," he said in a statement.

RSF's handcuff protest banner was draped across Paris city hall yesterday, alongside a Tibetan flag, leading Olympic organisers to change their route and cancel a high-profile ceremony with Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe.

Two RSF activists were arrested as the torch set off from the Eiffel Tower, for trying to vault over the security cordon protecting it.

Three of them managed to climb up inside the Eiffel Tower and unfurl one of their handcuff flags, chaining themselves to the monument in protest.

They hung the same flag from a building on the Champs-Elysees as the torchbearers made their way up the famous avenue-booed and jeered by protestors. Scuffles broke out as soon as the flame left on its journey, with the torchbearers forced at least four times to take refuge on a bus as they struggled through the capital. At one point the torch flame was extinguished, although French police later insisted that was due to a "technical fault."

The torch's journey by foot ended outside the French parliament, where protesting deputies had hung a Tibetan flag on a railing. It was taken by bus on the final half of its trip to a stadium in the south of the city.