The murky case came to light in a news report on Russian television just before presidential elections in March that returned Mr Putin to the Russian presidency, after four years as Prime Minister.

Chechen Adam Osmayev, 31, was detained in a rented flat in Odessa along with his father, in early February. Nothing of the arrests made it into the news until the end of the month, when just a few days before the elections, state-controlled television broadcast a dramatic prime-time report.

Chechen Adam Osmayev himself appeared in the report, with a face covered in bruises, and admitted that he was planning a number of terrorist attacks, including on Mr Putin himself. The plan was to blow up his motorcade as it travelled through Moscow. One of his co-conspirators died when a home-made bomb went off at the Odessa flat, alerting Ukrainian authorities to the presence of the terrorist cell.

The court Tuesday rejected the appeal lodged by Osmayev’s defence team and upheld the decision by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office.

Under Ukrainian law, the ruling may not be appealed again.

“A decision to ‘kill’ Osmayev has been made,” lawyer Valery Kochetov said.

In February, Ukrainian and Russian security services said they had detained two men with Chechen links who were suspected of attempting to kill Putin.

Osmayev confessed to planning to murder Putin on the orders of Chechen warlord Doku Umarov.

News of the plot came a week before the March 4 presidential polls in which Putin claimed a landslide victory.

Some analysts and opposition figures have said the plot was fabricated to boost Putin’s percentage.

Reports of thwarted assassination attempts against Putin appeared in advance of every election since the former KGB agent came to power in 1999.

A number of Russian media said Chechen militants were planning to kill Putin, then the caretaker president, during his first presidential run in February 2000.

Russia’s security services neither confirmed nor denied the information.

Ahead of Putin’s re-election bid in 2003, Britain said it thwarted a suspected plot by two renegade KGB officers to assassinate Putin while on a foreign trip.

Security experts say Mr Putin is one of the world’s best-protected leaders, and that any plot to kill him using improvised explosive devices would have little chance of succeeding. A source in the Ukrainian investigative team told Interfax news agency that although a video of Mr Putin’s motorcade was found on the hard disk of Osmayev’s computer, it is thought that this was used to train terrorists and was not actually part of a sophisticated plot to assassinate the then-Prime Minister.

Many critics of Mr Putin suggested the story could have been cooked up to provide increased backing for the leader, as unprecedented street protests gathered force ahead of the elections. Mr Putin won the elections with 63 per cent of the vote.

It is unclear when a potential trial of Osmayev in Russia would take place and whether it will be open to the public or held behind closed doors.

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