Father of missing Jay Slater says he ‘just wants the boy back’

The father of Jay Slater, the missing British teenager, said “I just want the boy back” as he visited the remote spot in Tenerife where his son went missing on Monday.

Speaking for the first time since the 19-year-old disappeared, Warren Slater spoke just a single sentence through sobs of tears as the search for Jay entered its sixth day.

He spoke to the Telegraph after visiting the remote spot in the north of the Spanish island where Jay went missing on Monday morning.

Joined by his other son, Zak, and eight of Jay’s friends, Mr Slater visited an Airbnb cottage near the village of Masca that his son had visited after attending a music festival with friends.

‘I’m just exhausted’

Earlier, Jay’s mother, Debbie Duncan, had told The Telegraph: “I’m just exhausted.”

“I’ve not slept for five days,” Ms Duncan said.

“I’m still hopeful. I’m not feeling negative just yet.

“I don’t know what it’s been like today because I’ve been advised to stay away because I would just break down.

“My boy might be just up there somewhere.

“We’re all devastated. He’s just a normal boy from a little town in Lancashire. These things don’t happen.”

Speaking to PA, Ms Duncan said she did not know whether the Spanish authorities turning down an offer of help from the UK was because they viewed it as “an insult”.

Lancashire Constabulary said it had made “an offer of support to the Guardia Civil to see if they need any additional resources”, which was rejected by Spanish authorities.

“I believe they said they’ve got enough resources and they don’t need the help from English police,” Ms Duncan said.

Asked what message she would have for her son, Ms Duncan added: “We just need you home – we just need him home.”

TikTok sleuths join search

TikTok sleuths have flown from Britain to Tenerife to join the search for the teenager.

Jay was last heard from on Monday morning when he told a friend he was lost in the mountains and desperately thirsty.

He had earlier met two men at a music festival on the Spanish island and followed them back to their cottage.

Police and mountain rescue teams are using dogs and drones to comb the barren landscape for the missing teenager, who is from the Lancashire town of Oswaldtwistle.

At least five British nationals have each spent hundreds of pounds on aircraft tickets to make the almost 2,000-mile journey to help with the search, despite having no connection to Mr Slater.

Paul Arnott, 29, who runs the TikTok account Down the Rapids and describes himself as an “explorer”, spent up to £400 on travel from Fort William, in Scotland.

“It’s cost quite a few hundred pounds so far,” he told The Telegraph as he started his first day of searching on Saturday afternoon.

“I’ve been trying to contact mountain rescue all day but I haven’t been able to get through to anyone.

“This is the area where he was last seen. The idea is ideally to communicate with mountain rescue and the police and if I can’t get a response then I’ll do my own thing in this area and try and work out where’s not been searched.

‘I’d want someone to help me’

“If something happened to me, I’d want someone to come out and help me. I believe what goes around comes around.”

Mr Arnott has been helped by Andrew Knight, 29, who lives in Tenerife and has been loaning cars to other British nationals who want to help with the search. Mr Knight said he knew of five people who had arrived from the UK so far.

“The more people looking, the better,” he said. “It’s a very scary, difficult landscape. It’s difficult to search and easy to go missing.”

The case bears a striking resemblance to the disappearance of Nicola Bulley in Lancashire last year, when dozens of amateur social media sleuths descended on St Michael’s on Wyre to search for the missing mother-of-two.

More than half a million people have joined a group that has begun posting bizarre theories online about Mr Slater’s disappearance.

Mr Slater travelled to Tenerife with two friends to attend the NRG music festival on Sunday. He left the festival at some time between 3am and 6am in the car of two other British men he had met that night.

At 7.30am, he posted a picture on Snapchat showing him smoking a cigarette at the doorway of a cottage in Parque Rural de Teno, more than 30 miles from where the festival was held to the south of the island.

At around 8am, Ofelia Medina Hernández, the owner of the two-bedroom Airbnb property where Mr Slater had travelled to, came across the teenager standing at a nearby bus stop.

He asked when the next bus was to Los Cristianos, a resort area where he had been staying, and she signalled it was not for another two hours. Instead of waiting, Mr Slater decided to walk.

After setting off, he rang his friend Lucy Law, who had joined him at the music festival, and said he was lost, thirsty, had 1 per cent charge left on his phone, and had cut his leg on a cactus.

His phone died shortly after the call. Its last location was north of the cottage, near the village of Masca.

It is here that much of the search has been concentrated over the past week. Mountain rescue workers, volunteers, drones, dogs and helicopters have so far been unable to uncover any trace of the teenager.

The search is now focused on two ravines in an area thick with undergrowth and with little protection from the sun.

The punishing conditions have not stopped around 15 of Mr Slater’s friends and family members from flying out to aid in the search. Some have even been collecting cigarette butts in the hope that they will prove useful.

His mother and brother have been on the island since Tuesday. “It’s just traumatic and it doesn’t feel real. It’s just awful, it’s horrendous,” Ms Duncan said. “He’s just a great person who everyone wanted to be with. He’s good-looking, he’s a popular boy.”

Many more have joined efforts by posting on a Facebook page dedicated to finding Mr Slater, which had more than 468,000 members before it was paused after conspiracy theories about his disappearance began to appear.

More than £27,000 has also been raised through a GoFundMe page, which has been set up by Ms Law to “get Jay Slater home”.

Lancashire Police said on Friday that it had offered to provide additional resources to the search but said the Guardia Civil rejected the offer as it has “the resources they need”.