Egypt on Thursday forcibly deported four Chechen students to Russia, where Amnesty International says they risk being tortured, but a traffic jam prevented police from getting a Chechen commander's son to the airport in time to join them.
Four students among dozens rounded up by security services on May 27 were put on a flight to Moscow.
But police transporting Maskhud Abdullayev, were caught up in a traffic jam and the youth did not reach the airport, a friend told AFP.
The rights group expressed concern on Wednesday that 22-year-old Maskhud Abdullayev would be tortured if sent back to Russia. He is the son of Supyan Abdullayev, the leader of an armed Chechen group opposed to Moscow's control of the region.
"A police officer took him to the airport but they were delayed on the way by a traffic jam and the plane had already taken off," said Ruslan Mussayev.
"He doesn't want to go to Russia; there's a problem for him there," Mussayev said of Abdullayev, who he said is now due to fly on Friday.
Maskhud's uncle, Ruslan Abdullayev, told Reuters in Cairo Maskhud and another student, identified by Amnesty as Akhmad Azimov, missed their flight to Moscow because the police transporting him were caught up in a traffic jam and the youth did not reach the airport on time.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is due in Egypt for talks on Tuesday, but Ruslan said he did not believe his nephew's deportation was linked to the visit.
The two students had been asked to buy new tickets for a later flight to Moscow, but did not have enough money, Ruslan said, adding they would probably be deported on Friday.
Speaking via a translator, Ruslan said he feared his nephew would be held hostage to put pressure on his relatives among Chechen rebels to surrender.
"If a father, brother or cousin is in the (Chechen) resistance, the Russian authorities take a relative, a young man, a father, they take him and order the (rebel): 'Hand yourself over, or I'll kill (him),'" Ruslan said.
He added that Maskhud left Chechnya as a child and had nothing to do with the conflict there.
"He never broke the law, in Russia, Chechnya or Egypt. He has nothing to do with those things. He's just a young man studying here," Ruslan said.
The Chechens Egypt is deporting were students at Cairo's al-Azhar University and all claimed refugee status in Azerbaijan before moving to Egypt to study, according to Amnesty. They have not been allowed to fly to Azerbaijan.
Amnesty said about 35 Russian students, mainly from the provinces of Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, were arrested in May during a wave of detentions of foreign students at al-Azhar.
A spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency said it had asked the Egyptian government grant it access to the men.
The students had been rounded up for suspected links to an alleged Al-Qaeda cell responsible for a February 22 bombing in Cairo's tourist district which killed a French teenager.
Abdullayev, who had been studying at Cairo's renowned Al-Azhar Islamic University since 2006, was initially held incommunicado at Egypt's notorious Tora prison, London-based Amnesty said.
The students all claim to have refugee status in Azerbaijan but the Egyptian authorities insisted they return instead to Russia where they face torture or other ill-treatment, Amnesty said.
It added that four other students arrested at the same time were deported to Russia on June 9, where Russian and Chechen security forces handcuffed them and took them away on arrival.
One of the four has since disappeared and is believed to have been moved to Chechnya.
Amnesty says it regularly receives reports of detainees being tortured in Russia, while in Chechnya detainees are at risk of torture, extrajudicial execution and enforced disappearance.
Source: Agencies
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