By Daily Mail Reporter Updated:
This was the gruesome moment an illegal immigrant who murdered his neighbour was captured on bus CCTV carrying his victim’s head in a bag.
Mohamed Boudjenane had murdered Lakhdar Ouyahia two days earlier, just hours after he had raped a Phillipino woman in his flat.
The 45-year-old Algerian was obsessed with the woman and shaved off her hair after assaulting her.
He then killed Mr Ouyahia after believing the pair were having an affair, a court heard.
CCTV image of Mohamed Boudjenane, carrying a bag on a bus, shortly after the murder of his neighbour
He was captured on CCTV carrying the head of Mr Ouyahia in a plastic bag on a bus to the Regents Canal in Maida Vale, west London.
Two days later the headless corpse was discovered wrapped in a duvet at the back of a supermarket near his home in Kilburn, north-west London.
Boudjenane showed police where he had thrown the head in a canal and police divers recovered it from the water.
But he claimed he had no memory of hitting Mr Ouyahia with a hammer and hacking off his head with a meat cleaver.
The Old Bailey heard he met the 42 year-old Phillipino woman at a party a few months before the attack.
She worked as a nanny in Oxford but on February 3 this year ran into him outside a newsagents in Kilburn, and reluctantly agreed to go to his flat.
Mohamed Boudjenane casually strolls along with his victim’s head in a plastic bag
He double locked the front door, tied her up with shoelaces and shaved off her hair, raping her twice.
The court heard Boudjenane threatened to kill her by putting her in a tub of boiling water and also accused her of being a prostitute and having sex with ‘the man upstairs’ – Mr Ouyahia.
But he let her go the next day after she repeatedly promised to become a Muslim to marry him.
He then went to Sainsbury’s at around 8pm to buy bleach, Dettol and a mop as he plotted to kill Mr Ouyahia and was next seen boarding a bus carrying a ‘head-shaped’ bag on February 5.
The victim’s headless body was discovered by a member of the public at the back of Somerfield’s supermarket in Kingsgate Place on February 6 this year.
Mohamed Boudjenane (left), who was jailed for life after killing his neighbour Lakhdar Ouyahia (right) and dumping his head in a canal
Boudjenane admitted he had killed Mr Ouyahia but claimed he could not remember anything about the attack or his movements up until his arrest.
His barrister Orlando Pownall QC asked him: ‘Do you accept that you must have taken the head of Mr Ouyahia on the bus and threw it into the canal?’ He replied: ‘No.’
Mr Pownall asked: ‘Who else could it have been if it wasn’t you?’ Boudjenane said: ‘I can’t remember.’
Mr Pownall: ‘Did you use that cleaver to cut his head off?’ Boudjenane: ‘I don’t know.’
Judge Moss told him: ‘I have no doubt on the evidence that you intended to kill him. Thereafter, you insulted his dead body by mutilation. You decapitated his body and tried to dismember him.
‘You disposed of the head and body in an attempt as I find to avoid capture. You are, it seems to me, a very dangerous individual.’
Boudjenane complained of having suicidal thoughts and hearing strange voices – although he didn’t know what language they were speaking in.
The psychiatrist decided he did not have any psychiatric illness but he was seen at an outpatients’ clinic over the next year.
He had a failed asylum bid in 1998 but remained in the country claiming benefits after his appeal was turned down, the court heard.
Boudjenane was convicted of murder, two counts of rape and false imprisonment by an Old Bailey jury.
Judge Christopher Moss QC jailed the Algerian for life, with a minimum term of 22 years.
