Two teens in court for murder of Yorkshire businessman

TWO teenage boys have appeared in court charged with the murder of a Yorkshire businessman in a Tenerife villa.

Company director Peter Cockshutt, 71, was stabbed twice in the chest and once in the leg, police have said. His body was found on Monday after what may have been a bungled robbery.

A 16-year-old and a 14-year-old, both of South American origin, appeared before a public prosecutor in Santa Cruz on the Spanish holiday island on Wednesday, a spokeswoman at the British Consulate in Tenerife said.

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They are charged with murder and robbery, the Tenerife Civil Guard said.

The windows had been forced in the villa in Costa del Silencio and everything inside was in disarray, a Civil Guard spokeswoman said.

The teenage boys, who are from Chile and Uruguay, are being held in a prison for minors, she added.

They were taken back to the villa yesterday for a crime scene reconstruction, she said.

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The resort of Costa del Silencio - or the Silent Coast - is in the Arona municipality and was one of the first areas of the Spanish island to be specifically developed for tourism.

Mr Cockshutt and his wife Patricia, who have five children and nine grandchildren, shared their time between their home in Brandesburton, in the East Riding and Tenerife.

Mrs Cockshutt had been on the island but flew home on Saturday, and asked a neighbour to call on her husband on Monday, after she was unable to raise him on the phone.

Today she said she wished she had been on hand to help him during the attack.

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She said: "I was only supposed to be back for a couple of weeks and then I would have flown back and we would have stayed until the end of April.

"My family say it is a good job I wasn't there, because it could have happened to me as well.

"But perhaps I could have tried to get an ambulance straight away if I had just been there. It's hard to take in."

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