Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said he had foiled a US-planned “coup” and “assassination” attempt against him and his family, Euronews reported.

Lukashenko also said that two people have been arrested by Russian security forces in Moscow in relation with the operation: political scientist Alexander Feduta and lawyer Yuri Zenkovich, who also has US citizenship, the news agency said.

It comes after the Belarusian security services, the KGB, announced on Friday evening that they had dismantled, during a “special operation”, an “organised group of terrorist orientation” which was planning the “physical elimination of the president and his family” and “the organisation of an armed rebellion in order to take power by violent means”, according to Euronews.

In a video released by the presidency, Lukashenko claimed that “we detained the group, they showed us how they had planned everything, I remained silent.

“Then we discovered the work of clearly foreign intelligence services, most likely the FBI, the CIA,” he went on.

Neither Russia nor the US has commented on Lukashenko’s assertions.