Jay’s father, Warren Slater, described the situation as “living hell” on Monday while also aiming criticism at some of the Spanish police.
He said while some officers on Tenerife had been “brilliant”, others had kept him in the dark.
Warren added: “Nobody’s told us. The mountain police [have been] brilliant… but I don’t know how the other police [force] works.
“They could be doing everything but if they are doing [something], they’re not telling us what they’re doing, if you understand what I’m saying.”
Jay set off on the 10-hour walk because he missed his bus in the morning, his friend Lucy has said.
Ofelia Medina Hernandez, whose brother owns the cottage where Jay stayed with the two men, said: “I held up my fingers on my hands to say 10am as he didn’t understand me. Then I went home briefly before driving up the mountain to Buenavista del Norte, but this time I saw him walking on the road out of the village.
“It was no more than 10 or 15 minutes after I had spoken to him and he was about a kilometre from the house. I drove past him and that’s the last I saw him.”
Warren is worried that Jay may have been kidnapped.
He told the Manchester Evening News: “You think, has somebody got him? Because no matter if you were drunk or whatever, you don’t go off that road up there.
“I knew right from when I went up there that he wouldn’t have gone [off that road]. He isn’t stupid. When I saw the police I asked them, seriously, ‘Would you go off that road?’ and I think it woke them up a bit.
“It started out as it being a lad who had gone walking and got lost, or that he may have fallen. But it doesn’t make sense. Nobody would walk off that road. Why would he have gone uphill?”
