By RORY TINGLE, HOME AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT and MIMI YATES, MULTIMEDIA REPORTER
Piled high with engines, seats, doors and bumpers, this is a stolen car graveyard packed with parts hacked off prized motors to feed a lucrative global trade.
The warehouse - tucked away in a cargo yard at the port of Felixstowe in Suffolk - contains hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of parts intercepted by police from shipping containers heading halfway across the world.
Filmed exclusively by the Mail, it offers an insight into the vast scale of the illegal trade in stolen car parts that is driving Britain's £1.77billion-a-year car theft epidemic.
Gangs steal vehicles to order off streets and driveways - typically by overriding keyless entry systems.
They are frequently ripped apart at black market yards, known as 'chop shops', before the parts are shipped to the Middle East or Africa - where they are in high demand due to shortages dating back to Covid.
Most are hidden inside shipping containers that are loaded onto ships at ports like Felixstowe. The vast scale of cargo exports means there is a strong chance they will pass through undetected.
The Mail was given a tour of the warehouse of stolen car parts as part of a week-long police blitz against the stolen car trade involving 37 forces.
This identified a total of thirteen chop shops across England and Wales, including one in London containing parts worth more than £300,000 and significant amounts of cash.
Do you have a story? Email rory.tingle@dailymail.co.uk
The warehouse - tucked away in a cargo yard at the port of Felixstowe in Suffolk - contains hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of parts intercepted by police
The scene, revealed to the Mail during a visit earlier this year, offers an insight into the vast scale of the illegal trade in stolen car parts that is driving Britain's car theft epidemic
The parts of the warehouse are collectively worth hundreds of thousands of pounds
Breaking cars down not only makes it easier for criminals to avoid tracking - it can also increase their revenues as the parts are often worth more than the complete car.
Police believe the gang controlling the chop shop in London could be responsible for more than £1m worth of car thefts.
During their own raids, West Midlands Police came across an 'Aladdin's Cave' of parts across a number of storage units, as well as living quarters for workers on site.
One chop shop also held a cannabis factory, weapons and controlled drugs were seized and around 60 number plates which are suspected to be used in avoiding detection by police and enforcement authorities.
More than 130 stolen vehicles were seized across the UK, either whole or already in parts.
Police try to reunite vehicles with their legal owners, which may be an insurance company if they have already paid out on a claim.
Adam Gibson, ports intelligence officer at the National Vehicle Crime Reduction Partnership (NaVCIS), said parts were taken to black market dealerships abroad where they were either used to fix broken cars or reassembled into new ones.
Operation Alliances was funded by the Home Office and used intelligence from Opal, policing's national intelligence unit for serious organised acquisitive crime.
DCI Kate Brummell, its Head of Operations, told the Mail: 'The parts are often more valuable than the cars themselves.
'Cars go to destinations including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the UAE, others go to Barbados and Cyprus.
'We know cars are often stolen for the terrain of their final destinations.'
The trove of parts would have been hugely valuable if sold on
During their own raids, West Midlands Police found an 'Aladdin's Cave' of car parts across a number of storage units, as well as living quarters for workers on site
Cars are often fitted with trackers, which can identify their location if they are not already disabled by criminals.
In a recent TV documentary, a stolen Audi was tracked down to a site called Baldwins Farm, an industrial estate in Essex that has long been linked to criminality.
The programme began with an Audi A4 that was stolen from a driveway in North London on March 15. Unbeknownst to the thieves, it had been fitted with a hidden tracker by the car leasing company.
This tracker showed the Audi moving east towards the borough of Enfield before switching off. Then, days later, it woke up 30 miles away in a patch of woodland in Baldwins Farm.
It later emerged that the tracker was not transmitting, possibly due to GPS jamming or blocking equipment. Five weeks later, it suddenly reappeared in Kaunas, Lithuania, and was tracked to a business in the outskirts of the city called Baltic Car Trade.
A team from Channel 4's Dispatches filmed police raiding on the property, but instead of finding a blue Audi A4, all that was left of the vehicle was a bunch of wires. The car, like many stolen off British streets, had been torn apart.
Operation Alliances led to more than 154 arrests, raising the possibility more of the criminals responsible for the UK's illegal car trade will be publicly exposed and prosecuted in the courts.
In a separate operation last year, police busted one gang behind a £3million chop shop in Oldham, Manchester.
The group, led by Asif Hussain, were linked to the theft of almost 100 stolen cars including Range Rovers, Mercedes, Porsche and BMWs.
Hussain used a £50,000 government Covid loan to invest in his illegal business. He was jailed for 15 years.
AA president Edmund King said: 'Closing chop shops, jailing signal jammers, stopping the sale of stolen parts and reuniting drivers with their stolen cars helps keep our roads and communities safe.'