A New Hyde Park man has left the country following his arrest in April on felony weapon possession charges, Nassau County police said Wednesday.
Police on Tuesday found four assault rifles, ammunition and black powder in the North Sixth Street home of Chandrakant Dhanak, 37, after receiving a call from Dhanak’s landlord, police said in a news release.
Dhanak told the landlord in a recent phone call that he was out of the country and would not return to the U.S., said Det. Lt. Richard LeBrun, the Police Department’s top spokesman.
The landlord does not live at Dhanak’s house and found the four guns when he went there to clean up, the news release says.
Dhanak, a U.S. permanent resident who immigrated from India as a student in 1998, was arraigned in April on nine felony charges of criminal possession of a weapon after police found nine unregistered assault rifles and 28 other guns legally registered to him in his house.
In April, Nassau police said their detectives and U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents were investigating where Dhanak purchased his weapons, whether he was smuggling weapons and whether he had connections to terrorist groups.
No evidence of weapons smuggling or terrorist connections had been found then, police said.
The Police Department’s asset forfeiture unit is investigating where he went, when he left the country and why his passport was not confiscated, LeBrun said. They are also determining whether the four guns found Tuesday are separate from the cache police recovered in April.
The Department of Homeland Security is not currently involved in the investigation, LeBrun said.
Dhanak last appeared in court Sept. 23 and was scheduled for an Oct. 11 conference hearing, court records show. Richard Ford, his Garden City-based attorney, did not immediately return a phone call for comment Wednesday.
Gabriel Garcia, deputy special agent in charge for the Department of Homeland Security, did not immediately return a phone call seeking more information. The department’s press office did not immediately return an email seeking information.
