British woman beheaded in supermarket attack identified

A British woman beheaded in an apparently random supermarket attack in Spain's Canary Islands has been identified as grandmother Jennifer Mills-Westley.

She was retired and living between Tenerife in the Canary Islands and France, where a daughter and grandchildren live, her family said in a statement Saturday, CNN reports.

In the attack on Tenerife, a Spanish vacation spot, an unemployed Bulgarian well known for occasionally proclaiming himself God on earth reportedly stole a knife from inside a Chinese supermarket in the resort town of Arona and attacked Mills-Westley, 60, severing her neck and then rushing on to the street with the head, the Guardian reports.

He was eventually stopped by an Italian man on a motorbike who threw his helmet, knocking the assailant to the ground, where passersby held him until the police arrived.

Under the headline "Machete maniac beheads British Woman in Tenerife," The Sun featured a photo of people holding the apparently blood-covered man on the ground.

Mayor José Alberto González said the attack was recorded on the supermarket's CCTV security cameras.

Colin Kirby, of tenerifemagazine.com witnessed the event. He told Sky News: "It was all a bit surreal I was heading past the commercial center and saw a group of people by the entrance and a medical guy going in form the health center. I assumed someone had fainted, walked on, and then I could hear screaming and shouting. I glanced behind me and a guy was ambling down the street holding what I assumed to be a joke head, by the hair."

The alleged killer is reportedly a 28-year-old Bulgarian, unemployed and homeless, and apparently well known in Arona.

The Telegraph reported Sunday that Deyan Valentinov Deyanov had been detained indefinitely in a psychiatric unit after a secret hearing. He was unlikely to face another hearing for at least four years, the paper quoted Spanish sources as saying.

British expatriate locals who lived near where Deyanov slept rough said he had become increasingly aggressive in recent weeks after splitting up with his girlfriend.

He had been shouting abuse at passers-by until 4 a.m. and flicked lighted cigarettes at female holidaymakers, the Telegraph quoted a man named Mike as saying. "Everyone had started to avoid him," he said

Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, an archipelago off the coast of north west Africa, is one of the U.K.'s most popular vacation destinations, with around 1.5 million Britons visiting every year.