Jay Slater could be alive “drinking water and eating plants”, a private investigator has claimed.
Army reservist and private investigator Juan García also told The Times that “the family should not give up hope”, also criticising the fact that the search was called off “too premature[ly]”.
The 53-year-old said he has “spoken directly to the family and offered my advice”.
The teenager went missing after a rave on the Spanish island of Tenerife, having last been seen around 8am on June 17 when he tried to make his way back to his holiday accommodation.
He had been attending a three-day NRG festival which ended the day before at the Papagayo beach club in the south of the island.
A friend of the 19-year-old – who had attended the festival with him – said Slater, of Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, had gone to stay with people he met after the night out.
The friend, Lucy, received a phone call from Jay at around 8am on Monday morning saying he had missed his bus and was trying to walk back but was lost, needed a drink and only had 1% battery on his phone. The phone call then cut off.
The phone died around 8.50am and his last known location registered in the remote Rural de Teno park, over ten miles from the popular resort Guía de Isora.
Mountain rescue crews and sniffer dogs had been searching the mountainous area in the northwest of Tenerife until making a shift in focus to the tourist hotspots of Los Cristianos and Playa de Las Americas in the south, after an alleged sighting of him getting out of a taxi.
This report later emerged as false and police, having wasted time in temperatures of nearly 30C, moved their attention back to the original site.
Slater is one of 11 people missing on the island in the last six months, including 27-year old Mariel Gonzalez Gutierrez and two-year old Sebastian Cobos Gonzalez who vanished in late March and Polish national Marek Sidelecki who was reported missing on June 14.
