Massive appeal sees volunteers help search for Jay Slater as two men ruled out of investigation
Groups of volunteers have taken to the mountains of Tenerife to search for Jay Slater after Spanish police issued a mass appeal for help in finding the missing teenager.
The 19-year-old has not been seen since Monday, 17 June, with few clues appearing over the last 13 days to shed light on his disappearance.
After attending the New Rave Generation festival in the beach resort of Playa de Las Americas, he travelled to the remote village of Masca with two older men, before deciding to make the 11-hour walk back to his accommodation at around 8am.
On Friday, the Guardia Civil appealed for volunteer associations, such as firefighters, and individual volunteers who were experts in rugged terrain to assist in a “busqueda masiva”, or massive search, on Saturday.
It has been focused near his last-known location in the mountains above the AirBnb, where his phone was last registered at around 8.50am. This was after he contacted his friend Lucy Law to say that he was dehydrated, lost, had injured his leg on a cactus and only had one per cent battery.
Search teams are having to navigate ravines, dense shrubbery and steep rocky areas with sniffer dogs, while drones and helicopters have previously taken part in the search.
The search in the village of Masca, near to his last-known location, is being co-ordinated to take in a steep rocky area, including ravines, trails and paths.
Brigadier Cipriano Martin, chief of the Guardia Civil’s mountain rescue team, said Mr Slater would not have travelled to “any area we don’t go to”.
Speaking through a translator, 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.”
Asked if the sea can be reached directly from the search area, he said: “You can reach the sea, in fact last Saturday I went along the whole path – there are old paths which are only occasionally used because it’s a cliff with very little attraction for sporting purposes.
“But you can reach the beach along them, so I reached the beach.
“We didn’t find anything. It’s a path that goes above and not along the bottom of the cliff, it has drops, and what’s needed are ropes to get down and we also know he was not equipped for that.
“There are rocky drops that you cannot get beyond, you can only get down with a harness and ropes – the people searching that spot today will have to turn around I think, because they don’t have the necessary equipment, and anyway the best that Jay could do was simply to walk.”
Mr Slater had travelled to the Canary Islands to attend the NRG music festival at Papagayo’s nightclub with two friends before his disappearance, and was reportedly driven to the AirBnb during the early hours of the morning.
According to reports, media were told in a press conference on Saturday that two men who were reported to have rented the Airbnb are “not relevant” to the case.
Speaking to ITV’s This Morning, his friend Brad Hargreaves said he had been on a video call with him when he heard him go off the road.
He said: “He was on the phone walking down a road and he’d gone over a little bit – not a big drop – but a tiny little drop and he was going down, and he said ‘I’ll ring ya back, I’ll ring ya back’ because I think someone else was ringing him.”
He confirmed he could see his friend’s feet “sliding” down the hill and could hear he was walking on gravel.
But, Mr Hargreaves said he and his friend were both laughing at that point.
He added: “He didn’t seem concerned on the phone until we knew how far away he was.”
Earlier this week, his mother Debbie Duncan, who travelled to the island following his disappearance, said money raised online would be used to support mountain rescue teams, and to cover her own accommodation and food costs.
Donations flooded in after GoFundMe appeal “Get Jay Slater home” was set up by Ms Law, his friend and the last person to speak to him, and by Friday more than £40,000 had been raised.
In an update on Thursday, Ms Duncan said: “We are currently working with GoFundMe to withdraw part of the funds, which are being safely held.
“I wanted to share that these funds will be used to support the mountain rescue teams who are tirelessly searching for Jay.
“Additionally, since our stay in Tenerife needs to be extended, we will also use the funds to cover accommodation and food expenses.”
Ms Duncan has described her son’s disappearance and the wait for news as a “living nightmare”.
