A high-profile monk who played a key role in bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West has been murdered in southwest China, police say.

Tarap Shetrup Akong, who has British citizenship , was killed along with his nephew and another man in Sichuan province on Tuesday, police in the provincial capital Chengdu said on their official account on the microblogging site Weibo.

Police said that three suspects have been captured, and that the victims were stabbed in a financial dispute.

Akong was born in Tibet in 1940 and left for exile in 1959. He founded a monastery called Samye Ling in a secluded part of Scotland.

Robbie Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University in New York, said that he was known for his social as much as spiritual work.

“The bulk of his life’s work was on providing social welfare to villagers, rural communities, townspeople, nomads and monasteries in Tibet and other countries.”

Barnett said that he had great diplomatic skill and was able to maintain relationships with high-level Chinese officials without compromising his work with Tibetans on the ground.