Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe said on Friday liberation war veterans would take up arms if he loses a June 27 presidential run-off vote.
Mugabe told youth members of his ruling ZANU-PF party in Harare that the veterans had told him they would launch a new bush war if the election was won by opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, whom he accuses of being a puppet of the West.
"They said if this country goes back into white hands just because we have used a pen (to vote), 'we will return to the bush to fight,'" Mugabe said, in the latest racketing up of pressure to extend his 28-year-presidency.
Tsvangirai, human rights groups and Western powers accuse Mugabe of unleashing a brutal campaign to win the run-off after he lost presidential and parliamentary elections on March 29.
Tsvangirai fell short of the majority needed to win the presidency outright in that vote. He says 66 of his followers have been murdered since.
But former guerrilla commander Mugabe, president since independence from Britain in 1980, blames the MDC for the violence which has caused widespread international concern.
"We cannot allow the British to dominate us here again through their puppets. You saw what they were saying (after the March elections), celebrating an MDC victory," the 84-year-old ruler said on Friday.
"These were the whites we took farms from."
The war veterans, usually acting alongside the ZANU-PF youth militia, have regularly been used to intimidate Mugabe's opponents and were involved in implementing the government's seizure of thousands of white-owned farms beginning in 2000.
Some of the seized land was given to the veterans.
Earlier, the MDC said Zimbabwean police impounded two campaign buses used by Tsvangirai in the latest action against the opposition leader in the election campaign.
