Missing Tenerife teenager Jay Slater sounded 'very distressed' before he disappeared

The friend of a British teenager who has gone missing in Tenerife has described his disappearance as "weird." Lucy Mae, who was holidaying with Jay Slater on the Spanish island when he vanished, last had contact with the 19-year-old on Monday morning June 17.

Lucy Mae had earlier told Manchester Evening News that he told her that his phone was about to run out of battery, that he needed a drink of water and was unsure of his location after spending the night in an apartment with people he met during a night out.

Speaking from Tenerife, Lucy has now said that Spanish police have said they are "keeping an open mind" as they continue their investigation into his disappearance and search for him in the Rural de Teno park, a mountainous area frequented by hikers near the village of Masca.

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Lucy said Jay was "not stupid" and that it was "weird" that no one had seen him in the two days since his disappearance was reported. "Jay's not stupid, it was just before 9am when he rang me so broad daylight and the area he was in is full of hikers," she said. "I've been up there every day ever since I got that phone call from Jay on Monday morning that made me panic and so many walkers and other people are up there.

"It's secluded, but the spot where he last made phone contact with me is near a main road and he would have had the wherewithal to flag someone down, to wave someone down and ask for help. There's something weird going on. In two days, you're telling me someone's not seen him? There's a restaurant 10 minutes away that he would have seen or walked past.

"Fair enough it didn't open for another two hours, but if that were me I would have sat and waited at the restaurant until it opened and as soon as it opened I would have said 'please can you put my phone on charge' and then I would have rung someone, I would have rung a taxi. It's weird."

Jay, an apprentice bricklayer from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, had travelled with Lucy and another friend to the Canary Islands for the three-day New Rave Generation (NRG) music festival which ended on Sunday.

Lucy left the festival early to go back to her holiday accommodation in the south of the island, leaving Jay to stay on with the friend they had travelled to Tenerife with from the UK and other friends he had met there. The teenager is then thought to have headed back for more drinks at the house of those friends without realising how far it was from his own rented place.

She said: "He's gone on a night out, he's gone to a friend's house, someone that he has met on holiday. One of the people he has met has hired a car out of here, so he's driven them back to his apartment and Jay has gone there not realising how far away it is.

"He's ended up out in the middle of nowhere. Jay was obviously thinking he would be able to get home from there. But then in the morning he's set off walking, using his Maps on his phone and ended up in the middle of mountains with nothing around. He rang me at about 8am saying his phone was on one per cent, he said 'I don't know where I am, I need a drink and my phone is about to die'."

Lucy fought back tears as she recounted the last-known location again, explaining on Tuesday: "He was in the mountains but it was just off a main road so this is what I don't understand. He's not stupid, in my mind he's not going to go off a main path and down a sheer drop or cliffs unless he's been forced down by someone who could have been following him.

"I've been up there myself every day. There's something not right. I'm really starting to think something's going on because someone would have seen him by now. I'm sorry but it's been 50 hours now. It's so busy up there, there's a lot of people around."

Lucy said his last known location is "like a viewpoint, it's a five to ten minute walk to the nearest café. I'm sure there's something going on. The police are not telling me anything and I don't know much about the people Jay went back from the festival with but they definitely should be spoken to if they haven't been interviewed already."

She said she left the festival as she was tired but that Jay had stayed on with two new friends he'd made and "a guy who we'd come with so there were four of them. I think those friends were British, although when I left the festival everyone was just mingling around. I took that last phone call from Jay around eight o'clock in the morning.

"I was asleep but I always sleep with my phone on ring in case there's something wrong. He just said to me, 'I need a drink, it's really hot, I don't know where I am and my phone's going to die.

"I said, 'If you're ever going to listen to anything I'm going to say to you, it needs to be now," she continued. "'If you're in the middle of nowhere with no water and no phone you're going to be f****d so you need to turn around and go back to wherever you came from and get help.'"

"He's like, 'I can't go back, I don't know where I am'. But he sounded very distressed and I don't know what's going on and I'm thinking now whether he was just distressed because he had no water or because of something else."

A spokesperson for the Civil Guard said: "The search operation is being conducted by the Civil Guard and different units are participating. They include the helicopter unit, the cynological unit which uses dogs, the Greim mountain rescue and intervention unit and citizen security patrols.

"The helicopter unit has one helicopter which has been participating in the search since it began on Monday. We're not going to talk about the number of officers involved but it's a large operation."

Explaining that the focus of the search was centred around the location where he was last seen, the spokesperson added: "The focus area is the area where we were informed the missing man had disappeared which is the narrow valley within the Teno Massif called the Masca Gorge. "When there's a disappearance police always look at all options and investigate all the possibilities. In this case no hypothesis has been ruled out as you'd expect at the start of any investigation."