Police in Spain have insisted they have not given up hope of finding missing Jay Slater in a new update.
The 19-year-old, from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, went missing more than three weeks ago in Tenerife. After almost two weeks of hunting for Jay in vast and mountainous terrain, Spanish police called off the search on the ground on June 30.
But today (July 9), police insisted that several lines of enquiry were still being pursued. A source close to the case insisted investigators were not working on the basis Jay was ‘missing feared dead’, the Mirror reports.
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Asked whether the investigation had moved on and police now had a clearer idea of what had happened to Jay, a spokesman for the Civil Guard said: “The investigation is ongoing and several lines of inquiry are being pursued.”
On Monday, the search for Jay hit a tragic landmark, with the search passing three weeks to the day since he was last seen on June 17. The teenager was holidaying with friends Lucy Law, 18, and Brad Hargreaves, 19, and had been partying at the Papagayo nightclub in Playa de las Americas the night before he vanished.
He left the club with two British men, one named Ayub Qassim, 31, known by the nickname ‘Johnny Vegas’, and an unnamed second man, to head to their Airbnb rental near the remote village of Masca on the north of the island. Jay left the Airbnb on the Monday morning.
At around 8.30am, he called Lucy to say he was in the middle of nowhere, trying to get home with no water and 1 per cent on his phone battery. His last known location was in the Rural de Teno Park in the north of the Canary Island – which was about an 11-hour walk from his accommodation in Los Cristianos.
Mr Qassim, who was imprisoned nine years ago for orchestrating a scheme to inundate Wales with Class A drugs, said Jay ‘came to the Airbnb alive and left the Airbnb alive’. Spanish police have deemed both men to be of no relevance to their missing person investigation.
Yesterday, Jay’s dad Warren blasted two ‘wild goose chases’ as he widened his personal search for the missing teenager. Warren was joined by Jay’s brother Zak in a gruelling search of Tenerife’s rugged valleys to where the 19-year-old was last seen.
But he voiced frustration with the challenging landscape, saying it would take an army 10 years to search all of the mountainous terrain. He told how they had been on ‘two wild goose chases’ on Sunday to abandoned buildings where they hoped Jay could be.
Warren continued to voice his frustration at the local police investigation, calling for British cops to get involved and help the family. He said: “I’ve been through 80% of that valley, so we went further along.
“We’ve drove and we’ve walked down the path at the next village, up the mountain there’s a viewpoint that looks down, you can either follow the road, but we didn’t, we parked up and walked down.”
Speaking to Mail Online yesterday, Warren added: “We need to, as a full family, do a proper press conference and ask the British authorities to help. He’s a British citizen. Get Interpol involved.
“It’s just us. I haven’t got a team. We need a team to come over here and find out for us what the police are doing and what we need to do.
“Our hands are tied over here, we need experts. How long can you stay here for?
“It’ll take an army 10 years to cover all this. I’d employ a team of Gurkhas.”
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