New York, Sept. 13: Fidel Castro has claimed that Cuba had once saved the life of President Ronald Reagan by tipping off American officials about an assassination plot by Right-wing extremists.

He made his extraordinary claim in a long newspaper essay read out on Cuban television in which he argued that his country had co-operated with the US in the past.

Castro wrote that a Cuban security official stationed at the UN was warned in 1984 of a plot by an extreme Right-wing group to kill Reagan during a planned trip to North Carolina later that year.

At a meeting two blocks from the Cuban mission in New York, the information was given to Robert C. Muller, the US mission security chief at the UN, who passed it on to his government, said Castro.

He wrote: “The information was complete: the names of those implicated in the plan; day, time and hour where the assassination could occur; the type of weapon the terrorists had and where they kept their arms.”

Castro did not reveal how the Cubans had stumbled on the plot but said their authorities learned later that the FBI had arrested several people in North Carolina.