Follow the events of the long-awaited election day in Pakistan here. Refresh and scroll down for updates.
9am GMT
Polls have been open in Pakistan for six hours and are due to close at 5 p.m. (Midday GMT). The government has made it a public holiday to encourage people to vote.
But it's very tense. More than 470,000 police and soldiers are deployed across the country. Voters who do travel to polling stations risk Taliban attack. Gunbattles between rival political factions have already left at least a dozen dead.
10am GMT
Papers in the UK report fears that the vote will almost certainly be rigged.
Writing in the Telegraph Ahmed Rashid says "expect anything but a free and fair election". In sixty years of elections the Pakistani people "have never faced a more unpredictable and frightening moment".
Rashid reports that Senator Joe Biden, in Pakistan to help monitor the elections, has said that "if the elections are 'patently rigged' he will call for an end to US military aid to Pakistan".
The paper also reports that Pakistan's new head of the army has repeated his call for members of the military to end their involvement in politics.
The Telegraph's source also claimed that one of Musharraf's close allies, who is head of one of the military intelligence agencies, would be moved on from his post after the election.
The FT editorial welcomes the retreat of the army from Pakistani politics. "Will the election be fair? Of course not. But it may provide something to work with. There is hope that the new army chiefs, anxious to recover the prestige of their institutions will not feel bound to rig the outcome in Mr Musharraf's favour".
The Independent has Jemima Khan reporting from Islamabad.
"This is my third consecutive election campaign. This time I'm only here as an ex-wife and an observer ... the conspiracy theories and dining-room debates in Pakistan are all gratifyingly similar ...everything else about this election feels different, though ... above all there is a palpable sense of fear".
11:15am
Pakistani blogger Teeth Maestro is publishing incidences of bribery and rigging as they come through to him. This text alleges Musharraf allies 'ransacked' ten polling stations and threw out agents working for Nawaz Sharif's PML-N party.
The Guardian's correspondent in Pakistan Declan Walsh and film maker Sean Smith have made this film . It gives some sense of what the election campaign has been like.
11:45am
The polls will close in 15 minutes.
We don't know what voter turnout has been overall but Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reports female voters have stayed away from voting.
"In the village of Palikhel (District Mianwali), female polling agents confirmed that there had been no female voters thus far, in line with their expectations. In Peshawar district, elders in several areas surrounding the city decided that voting by women was against their culture."
Midday
The polls in Pakistan are now closed and first reports are that turnout has indeed been very low - below the 41% that voted in 2002's election.
12:45pm
Human Rights Watch's Ali Hasan is in Lahore monitoring the election and is now going home to wait for the first results.
He tells me that there is no doubt wide-scale rigging has occured. "I even heard one story that [Musharraf's party] the PML-Q had been declared the winner of a constituency - Battagram - before the polling station had actually closed".
As for the news at the end of last week that Musharraf had made it illegal for unofficial results to be announced outside local polling stations, there appears to have been something of a retreat on this over the weekend.
"Polling stations appear to be announcing provisional results, so Musharraf's new rule appears not to be happening. There is a lot of confusion".
1:25pm
Bloggers continue to post their evidence of rigging on Teeth Meastro's website. The latest comment reports that under aged teenagers were being allowed to vote and when someone - an adult this time - asked whether they could vote more than once they are supposed to have been told, yes. As long as it's for the winning party.
