EXCLUSIVE
By JEROME STARKEY and OLIVER HARVEY in Lashkar Gah and TOM NEWTON DUNN, Defence Editor
RUTHLESS Taliban thugs have vowed to make Afghans eat their own fingers if they vote in today’s presidential election.
The foreign fighters warned Helmand locals they would chop off fingers marked with the purple ballot ink and force them down their throats.
The vile threats emerged as the war-torn nation braced itself for more bloodshed amid fears that dozens of polling stations would be bombed.
Disruption and intimidation by the Taliban intensified during the hours leading to the start of the elections early this morning.
The Sun found that insurgents had blocked roads in Helmand - the British-controlled southern province - to stop voters from even getting to the ballot boxes.
It also emerged that 20 per cent of the voting slips and boxes had not been delivered in time. Many were having to be transported by donkey along mountain roads.
And Helmand’s most senior mullah, Haji Maulavi Mokhtar, said al-Qaeda fighters from Chechnya and Saudi Arabia had forced local farmers to eat their voter registration cards.
He said: “They don’t want this election. At their checkpoints, when they find people with voter registration cards, they force them to chew them and eat them.” (Read more)
