CAIRO, EGYPT - Human rights group Amnesty International said Egypt planned on Thursday to deport six students from Chechnya, including the son of a warlord, to Russia where they are at risk of torture.

Mashkud Abdullaev, the son of Chechen rebel leader Supyan Abdullaev, and five other students were detained on May 27 in a wave of arrests of foreigners studying at Cairo's renowned Al-Azhar Islamic University, Amnesty said.

Egypt's interior ministry said the arrests were made as the foreigners might have links to an alleged Al-Qaeda cell responsible for a bombing in Cairo's tourist district on February 22 in which one person died.

Abdullaev, who had been studying at Al-Azhar since 2006, has been held incommunicado since his arrest, the London-based rights group said.

The Egyptian authorities were not immediately available to confirm the deportations.

The students, four men and two women, say they have refugee status in Azerbaijan but the Egyptian authorities are insisting 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 transferred 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 disappearances.

The predominantly Muslim region fought two wars with Moscow after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, but it has achieved a measure of stability in recent years under the rule of strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov.