Beam them up, Heidi - Remembering the Las Canadas suicide sect scare

It is nine years to the week since Tenerife suddenly leapt to international prominence, swept the prime slots on all the 24 hour news services and hogged the front pages of a host of newspapers around the world.

Bad news is good news in the media and Tenerife was hot news for all the wrong reasons as far as the tourism authorities were concerned that week in which the island became the focus for an unprecedented feeding frenzy.

The BBC report filed on January 8 1998 put it like this:

“Spanish police say they have prevented a possible suicide attempt by members of a cult based in Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands. The authorities in Tenerife say the 31 members of the cult, who are mainly British and German, were The BBC report filed on January 8 1998 put it like this:

“Spanish police say they have prevented a possible suicide attempt by members of a cult based in Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands. The authorities in Tenerife say the 31 members of the cult, who are mainly British and German, were planning to commit suicide later today. Police have detained a German psychologist said to be the leader of the sect …”

The garbled accounts of that strange night relied heavily on police reports with a good deal of imaginative hearsay and unconfirmed rumours thrown in for good measure.