A FORMER Wycliffe College student goes on trial today accused of an elaborate plot to blow up Vladimir Putin.

Chechen born Adam Osmayev will appear before a court in Odessa, Ukraine, charged with planning to detonate a home-made bomb next to the Russian president’s motorcade in Moscow.

The 31-year-old lived in Britain from 1994 to 2002 and studied for his A-levels at Wycliffe College and economics at the University of Buckingham.

Osmayev denies charges of terrorism and claims that Ukrainian officers beat him, suffocated him with a plastic bag and threatened to hurt his father in order to extract a confession – which he later gave them.

He was arrested in Odessa in January last year after an apparent bomb blast in a rented flat alerted authorities to the use of explosives.

According to the prosecution, Doku Umarov – Russia’s most wanted man – tasked Osmayev to prepare a terrorist cell in Odessa for onward travel to Moscow.

Once in the Russian capital the men would blow up three cars filled with explosives in the path of Mr Putin’s motorcade some time in spring last year.

Analysts have called the plans fanciful and suggested that the charges were probably fabricated as a pre-election stunt.

News of the apparent assassination plan was aired for the first time on Russian state-controlled television last February, just a few days before the presidential election that returned Mr Putin to the Kremlin.