A man was arrested in Ansonia after police said they found him illegally dismantling vehicles inside an East Main Street building and shipping the parts to his native Iraq.
Police called in federal authorities after detaining the shop’s operator, Hayder Abdulrasool Al-Kulabi, 42, of Rock Street in New Haven, who is in the United States from Iraq on a 60-day visa.
Ansonia police initially suspected Al-Kulabi of running an illegal “chop shop,” but they concluded the vehicles were not stolen.
Police allege Al-Kulabi had no authorization to be doing the motor vehicle work.
Al-Kulabi was charged with eight counts of violating state motor vehicle recycling registration requirements. The charges are misdemeanors.
Al-Kulabi was arraigned at Superior Court in Derby Friday, where Judge Theodore Tyma set his bond at $5,000, which he later posted.
He is due back in court Oct. 10.
Police were called to Al-Kulabi’s business — inside 540 E. Main St., a 78,000-square-foot building owned by a North Main Street-based limited liability corporation — by the city’s blight officer, David Blackwell Sr., about 10:30 a.m. Thursday (Sept. 25).
While at the scene, Ansonia cops called in federal authorities — including the FBI and officials with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement — after determining Al-Kulabi is an Iraqi national here on a temporary visa, Ansonia Police Lt. Andrew Cota, said Monday (Sept. 29).
The Valley Indy was unable to find out how long Al-Kulabi has been in the U.S.
“Whether or not they’re going to continue with anything else on their end, I don’t know,” Cota said of the federal agents.
The Valley Indy left a message with the FBI in New Haven Monday.
According to a police report at Superior Court in Derby written by Detective John Rafalowski, police had a tough time communicating with Al-Kulabi because he does not speak English.
On Friday, the FBI sent an agent who speaks Arabic.
Rafalowski’s report says “the vehicles were being dismantled for parts shipment to Iraq.”
“The eight VIN numbers that were located on different parts of the vehicles were not mutilated, obliterated, or removed,” Rafalowski wrote. “The VIN numbers were checked through (the) Department of Motor Vehicles and at the time none of the eight VIN numbers were reported stolen.”
Trade with Iraq was severely limited in the 1990s by a series of U.S. and United Nations economic sanctions. However, most of the trade regulations with the country “were returned to a largely normalized state,” after the second Gulf war, according to a September 2010 guide from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The U.S. Department of Commerce also published a “Guide to Doing Business in Iraq” in 2012.
But Al-Kulabi was charged locally because he didn’t have a license or “recycler’s business certificate” to be operating the business in Ansonia, authorities said.
“We went down there investigating illegal repairs and found a guy that was essentially buying cars, legally, taking them apart, and putting them on a container and shipping them across the ocean,” Cota said.
“He wasn’t doing anything illegal per se besides running the recycling business without a permit,” he said. “As far as we could tell, all the paperwork he had showed that he was properly purchasing the cars and taking them apart.”
When police went to the business they found assorted car parts — doors, hoods, bumpers, etc. — as well as a couple of vehicles in the process of being dismantled.
Over the years Cota said police have been called to the building many times to investigate complaints of illegal repairs being performed there.
