Tenerife police update on missing Jay Slater as pal says 'something weird is going on'

The widescale search for missing Lancashire teen Jay Slater in Tenerife has entered its second day.

A helicopter and drone have been deployed to the mountainous Masca Gorge region - with police working on the theory that Jay may have lost his bearings and potential become injured or dehydrated. The case - which has been compared to the recent tragic disappearance of TV doctor Michael Mosley - has been shared worldwide and tens of thousands of people have joined a social media page which hopes to help in the search.

Police say they have dedicated significant resources to the search and have not ruled out foul play. A Civil Guard spokeswoman in Tenerife said just before 11am local time today: “We are still searching for the missing man. The search operation is being conducted by the Civil Guard and different units are participating.

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“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. 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. This case no hypothesis has been ruled out as you’d expect at the start of any investigation.”

A well-placed source said: “The probability the missing man has lost his bearings and could have suffered an accident in unfamiliar terrain doesn’t mean other possibilities won’t be considered and actively worked on if investigators feel there’s sufficient clues to warrant it. That said the large search operation that’s ongoing suggests the idea this person became disorientated is the likely scenario as far as police are concerned, even if no-one is officially saying so at the moment.”

Apprentice bricklayer Jay, 19, from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, had travelled with pal Lucy Mae and another friend to the Canary Islands for the three-day ‘New Rave Generation (NRG) music festival which ended on Sunday. She left the festival early to go back to her holiday accommodation in the south of the island, leaving Jay to stay on with the pal they had travelled to Tenerife with from the UK and other friends he had met there.

Lucy said this morning: "Jay's not stupid, it was just before 9 o’clock in the morning when he rang me so broad daylight and the area he was in is full of hikers. 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. It is suspicious.

“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 till 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."

Fighting back tears, she added: “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.

“That last location is like a viewpoint, it’s a five to ten minute walk to the nearest cafe. I’d left the festival to come back to my hotel early because I was tired. Jay had stayed on with two new friends he’d made.

“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.

“If you’re in the middle of nowhere with no water and no phone you’re going to be f***ed 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.”