A major update has been issued in the ongoing search for Jay Slater as police have revealed new information about the two men the missing Brit shared an Airbnb with before disappearing.
The 19-year-old from Lancashire vanished on June 17 after attending a rave in Tenerife where he met two men and stayed the night in their rented accommodation in Masca in the north west of the island.
The morning after, he attempted to make the 11-hour walk back down south to Los Cristianos where he was staying after missing the bus. The owner of the Airbnb was the last person to see Jay as he headed off into the distance.
The two men who were staying at the property then flew back to the UK and have not made themselves known since the mammoth search effort began 13 days ago.
Now, Tenerife’s Civil Guard has issued an update after they launched another phase of the search and rescue mission with experienced volunteers, with only six people turning up on Saturday morning.
Cipriano Martin, head of the Civil Guard’s Greim mountain rescue unit, said: “Those men have been spoken to and they don’t have any relevance whatsoever for the case.”
The new search party began on Saturday morning and has been focussing its efforts around Hilda viewpoint in the north west of the island – close to where Jay’s phone last “pinged” – spanning five miles in one direction and 2.5 miles in the other.
Martin said: “The operation is going to consist of a search with the people that have come here today, in a thorough manner, because at the height we are, we need to progress by ruling out areas and make sure that the areas we search, with the work we have done this week, are looked at well and can be ruled out.
“And of course that’s going to be done based on the information we have, and that information is his last-known position, the conservations he had the day he disappeared, and that’s what makes us focus the search on that area.”
The last person to hear from Jay was his friend Lucy Law, who he was on holiday with. She phoned him on the morning of July 17 as he attempted the journey southward to where they were staying, saying that he was in desperate need of water and his phone was about to die. The call then cut out and no one has heard from him since.
Martin said the police are still working with “several possibilities” as the search of the mountainous terrain and ravines has so far found nothing.
He said: “Until we know something we can’t focus on any hypothesis and we work with several possibilities. Masca’s been looked at, the Juan Lopez ravine, the Retamar ravine, Las Aneas ravine, Los Carrizales ravine, in all the areas we know he’s been in because his mobile phone coverage is undeniable and places him there.
“But we have a difficulty which is that once the phone goes off the antennas stop picking it up, so that while he’s walking, and we don’t know how long he was walking for, no phone mast is going to detect it, and as the technicians tell us, they look for mobiles and not people, so we’re at that point as well, that we have certain information and we have to go on that.”
