A Romanian national arrested over the killing of a woman who was bludgeoned to death as she house-sat for friends more than five years ago will be extradited to the UK, police have said.

Valerie Graves, a 55-year-old artist, was found dead in bed at about 10am on 30 December 2013, on the ground floor of a £1.6m house by the sea in Bosham, West Sussex.

Cristian Sabou was arrested on a European arrest warrant on Wednesday morning at his home in Dej, in the north-west of his native Romania.

Sussex police said the 28-year-old faced an extradition hearing at a court in Cluj-Napoca, Romania on Thursday.

The force said Sabou did not contest the extradition application and arrangements would be made to bring him to the UK, where he would appear before magistrates before being sent for crown court trial.

Detectives from the Surrey and Sussex major crime team were present at the hearing and would remain in Romania to work with the authorities, the police added.

Sabou is expected to be extradited in the next 10 days, according to the Associated Press.

On the fifth anniversary of Graves’s death last December, relatives said no one had given up hope on the investigation although there was a sense police had exhausted all lines of inquiry.

At the time, Sussex police confirmed they had ended a DNA screening programme that tested almost 3,000 men but promised to continue investigating.

Graves had moved from Scotland to Bracklesham Bay in West Sussex shortly before her death. She died while house-sitting at the property on Smugglers Lane – with her mother, sister and her sister’s partner – for family friends who were on holiday in Costa Rica over Christmas.

She was last seen alive at about 10pm the night before and there were no signs of a struggle. But a postmortem found she had severe head injuries after being hit with a claw hammer, probably at around midnight. Sussex police then launched one of the biggest investigations in their history.