The wrecker with a flashy car, expensive jewellery and lucrative side hustle

Saturday, 2 August 2025

Abdul Karim Alizadah, who also goes by the surname Ahmadi, pictured during happier times.

As night falls, businesses in an industrial corner of eastern Christchurch shut up shop for the day, while an unexceptional car wrecking yard stays open.

Tucked in a maze of quiet side streets, Lion Auto Dismantlers is spread across two large sections near the foot of Christchurch’s Port Hills. From the street it has all the hallmarks of a stock standard chop shop. Piles of squashed cars stacked three-high surround a warehouse fitted with a large roller door. Behind a publicly accessible sliding door labelled ‘reception’ is an unmanned office buried in stacks of paper, tools and rubbish. On a small wooden desk sits a computer caked in layers of dust. During the day the yard is home to legitimate work easily mistaken for that of a local mechanic.

Lion Auto Dismantlers on Broad St in Woolston is spread across two large sections in a quiet industrial area of Christchurch.

Next door, 2.4m high corrugated iron fences obstruct a large outdoor yard laden with shipping containers and, crucially, the inside of the warehouse - the beating heart of a more sinister operation. After the office shuts, the sun goes down and everyone goes home, a brand new Toyota SUV worth more than $100,000 is driven into the yard. Like many nights before, the delivery is pre-arranged, and the work is just beginning.

The premium SUV is cut down and its most valuable parts set aside. The engine bay is separated from the rest of the body and is loaded onto a shipping container with the doors, the rear axle and the drive train. The container is later picked up from the yard and sent to the United Arab Emirates where the owner of the yard Abdul Karim Alizadah, who also goes by the surname Ahmadi, has connections.

Ahmadi lives in a $1.3m home with a $350,000 Mercedes parked in the driveway.

For more than a year the night time drop-offs happen routinely. They are arranged using a burner phone taped to a toilet cistern. Photographs are posted on a WhatsApp group chat of car parts inside the shipping container upon arrival in Dubai. Ahmadi asks how much they will sell for. In his second-hand dealer’s notebook he uses fake names to record who sold him the cars for a fraction of their value. Sometimes he records a different model of car, or nothing at all.

The arrangement went on without a hitch for a year-and-a-half as Ahmadi’s legitimate car wrecking business proffered a convincing front to his more lucrative side hustle. The yard received what is thought to be more than $1 million worth of stolen cars.

Police speak to two men at Lion Auto Dismantlers.

The former tiler was not shy in spending the fruits of his newfound labour. Registered to Lion Auto Dismantlers was a 2023 Mercedes-AMG G63 worth $350,000, registration ALIZDA. He treated himself to expensive watches and gifted his wife jewellery, almost always paying with cash.

It did not last.

The now shut Lion Auto Dismantlers was once the beating heart of a sinister operation.

In September of last year, several arms of police and Customs officers descended on the Broad St, Woolston yard. Security footage they obtained showed stolen cars inside the warehouse with broken rear quarterlight windows - a common method for breaking into vehicles.

Ahmadi said he had so many customers and dealt with so many vehicles that he could not remember any details about receiving stolen cars. He said vehicles were sometimes dismantled quickly because there was not enough space to hold them.

Adbul Karim Alizadah during an earlier appearance at the Christchurch District Court.

He was arrested, charged and remanded on bail. Police successfully applied for a with-notice restraining order over a vehicle, real estate, shares, cash, jewellery and watches.

Lion Auto Dismantlers was closed when The Press visited later that week. The Mercedes was parked in the driveway of Ahmadi’s $1.3m Wigram home. Two of his relatives answered the door and said he wasn’t there. One threatened and filmed this journalist.

Two men on the other end of Ahmadi’s phone identified themselves as him. They said they did not recognise that any of the cars were stolen when they received them. “We checked them, they weren’t stolen,” they said. “After a week someone said it was stolen.”

The men threatened this journalist with legal action. “We’ll be coming after you,” one said. He said this journalist was trespassed from visiting them, then hung up.

Ahmadi pleaded guilty to 18 charges of receiving stolen property worth over $1000 at the Christchurch District Court this week. He admitted two other charges - failing to keep a proper secondhand dealer’s record and failing to keep articles in an unaltered state - related to the fake names and car models he entered when stolen cars came through his gates.

Lion Auto Dismantlers received dozens of stolen cars of various makes and models.

Detective Senior Sergeant Sarah Graham described the investigation as a shot across the bow of the secondhand dealing industry. She promised more arrests and said police would be naive to assume it was the only car wrecking yard involved in such illegal activity.

“Car theft has serious effects on people’s lives, and we don’t need anyone feeding that fire.”

Ahmadi is on bail and will be sentenced in November.