NEW DELHI: Senior Lashkar-e-Taiba operative Habibur Rahman, who was supervising plans from Saudi Arabia to carry out terror attacks in India, was arrested by the National Investigation Agency on arrival here on Sunday following his deportation from Riyadh .

The NIA said Rahman was arrested at the IGI airport as soon as he landed from Riyadh. Sources said his deportation was the result of cooperation between the two governments. He is being questioned to gather information about Lashkar’s plans for India and other cadres, some of whom are believed to be in Delhi-NCR for a terror strike in the run-up to Independence Day.

Rahman was the handler of LeT terrorist Shaikh Abdul Naeem alias Nomi, arrested in 2007 while trying to help two Pakistani and one Kashmiri terrorist infiltrate into India from Bangladesh . Naeem had escaped from police custody while being taken from Kolkata to appear in a court in Maharashtra in August 2014. This emboldened Naeem, who kept playing cat-and-mouse with agencies for three years during which he continued with his nefarious activities on the directions of his handlers based in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the NIA said.

