The Bulgarian vagrant who beheaded a British woman in a Tenerife shop last week has been placed in a secure psychiatric facility after a legal team hearing in the early hours of Sunday morning.
He is unlikely to face another hearing for at least four years.
CCTV pictures of Deyan Valentinov Deyanov, 28, his arms outspread to indicate the size of the knife he wished to buy to a shopowner, have circulated in the media this morning. The family of his victim Jennifer Mills-Westley arrived on the island on Saturday to repatriate her body.
Deyanov was known on Tenerife as a violent man and had told a shopkeeper he wanted to buy a knife in order to kill someone. Some 25 minutes after that conversation, he pounced on and killed Mills-Westley, a grandmother of five who divided her time between Tenerife and the UK.
Locals say he had recently split with his girlfriend and had become increasingly aggressive and unpredictable.
Residents working within the tourism industry have expressed dismay at the island’s mental health provision, telling Tenerife’s Canarias 7 newspaper that such a dangerous man, who was known to the police, should not have been allowed to roam free.
There are concerns that the incident will affect arrivals to the island from Britain.
by Dinah Hatch
