A man accused of decapitating a British woman on the holiday island of Tenerife has told a court he is an "angel of Jesus Christ" sent to create a new Jerusalem.

Jennifer Mills-Westley,60, was repeatedly stabbed and beheaded while shopping in the popular resort of Los Cristianos on May 13, 2011.

Homeless Bulgarian drug addict Deyan Deyanov, 29, has denied murdering the grandmother of five from Norwich as his trial at the Provincial Court in Santa Cruz de Tenerife got under way.

Answering questions in Bulgarian with the help of an interpreter, Deyanov told the court that he is haunted by voices in his head which tell him how to act.

He claimed that they told him he was "an angel of Jesus Christ who is going to create a new Jerusalem".

"They direct how I act, sometimes they say kill, fight, hit, pray," he said.

After watching "tough" CCTV footage of the attack, he said it was "a montage, a film" and claimed that he did not recognise himself in the images. The defendant said he had been using crack cocaine and LSD before his arrest, but had no memory of living in Tenerife. Asked if he knew he was in Tenerife after being brought there from a psychiatric unit in Seville on the Spanish mainland, he said: "I have just found out."

He also denied that he had lived in Wales, where he was sectioned in summer 2010 under the Mental Health Act at Glan Clwyd Hospital. Deyanov has been diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia.

Witness Davide Balsamo, an Italian who has lived in Tenerife for five years, described the moment he stumbled on the horrific scene coming out of a hardware store. He said: "I saw a guy walking around with a head in his hand. I came out of the shop and suddenly I saw him come off the curb, completely covered in blood. I ran up to him and hit him with all my strength using my motorcycle helmet and knocked him silly."

Asked if the defendant was the man he had struck, he said "yes", adding that his hair was a bit longer then.