Jay Slater: expert volunteers join search for missing teenager in Tenerife

Volunteers with experience navigating tough terrain are in Tenerife to help the Spanish police in the search for a missing British teenager.

Jay Slater, from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, was last heard from on 17 June when he called a friend to say he had no water and only 1% battery left on his phone.

Police have since been searching for the missing 19-year-old and now volunteers are helping to revisit ground previously covered by the local police.

The latest efforts began at 9am on Saturday, with Sky News reporting that between 30 and 40 police and volunteers had gathered in the village of Masca.

The area is known for its rugged hills and steep drops. Slater had been on holiday with friends and had gone back to a rented house in a rural part of the island with people he had met at a festival.

Juan Garcia, an experienced hiker, told Sky News he was planning to walk through the area with his sniffer dog. “I think for myself, if something happened to one of my sons … I would like people to help me to solve this case,” he said.

“Sometimes, even with only the police it’s hard because this is a very difficult area and you need a lot of experience walking. [There are] a lot of bushes and it’s very hard to walk and even in a few kilometres it takes a lot of time and it’s not so easy.”

One line of inquiry surrounded two British men who went north towards Masca from the festival with Slater, but police now say they are “not relevant” to the search.

On Friday, the Guardia Civil urged volunteer associations such as firefighters and experts in rugged terrain to register to take part in a “busqueda masiva”, or planned search, of the rocky area close to where the teenager went missing.

The Masca gorge, where the search is taking place, has already been checked by police with dogs and by helicopters and drones, which turned up no trace of Slater. He is not the first person to disappear in the area and locals said it could take months for the bodies of missing people to be found.

Brig Cipriano Martin, the chief of the Guardia Civil’s mountain rescue team, said Slater would not have travelled to “any area we don’t go to”.

Speaking through an interpreter, he told the BBC: “There are difficult areas and we’ve given instructions for people not to risk their own safety.

“But there’s something we need to make clear, which is any area we don’t go to, well, Jay won’t have gone there either.

“You have to think about it logically – if I see there’s vegetation in front of me and I’m going to get spiked, and I can’t get through, then he won’t have gone through that area either. We have to be logical, obviously.”

Slater’s friend Brad Hargreaves told ITV’s This Morning on Friday that he had been on a video call with him before his disappearance when he heard him go off the road.

He said he could see his friend’s feet “sliding” down the hill and could hear he was walking on gravel.

“At the time I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought he was going to get a bus home or a taxi home because that’s what he says he is going to do.”

Hargreaves said he and his friend were both laughing at that point.

Slater’s mother, Debbie Duncan, who has been on the island searching for her son for more than a week, said she was not losing hope that he would be found alive.

A GoFundMe page set up for the search for Slater surpassed £40,000 on Friday, and Duncan said the money would be used for mountain rescue, accommodation and food expenses.