Day of drama and despair before Rwanda flight called off

As the hours passed, things were looking more and more hopeless, until a Strasbourg court intervened

On Tuesday morning, Jetmir*, a 26-year-old asylum seeker, woke up in Colnbrook immigration removal centre with a sickening knot in his stomach. It was the day he believed he would be bundled on to a plane and forcibly removed from Britain - not to his native Albania but to a country he knew nothing of.

He could hear the sound of planes landing and taking off at nearby Heathrow airport and feared it was only a matter of hours before he would be put on a flight to Rwanda along with six other asylum seekers.