Rescue teams on the Spanish island of Tenerife have discovered the body of a young man in the area where the British teenager Jay Slater disappeared.
In a statement, Spain’s national police force, the Guardia Civil, said rescuers had found remains.
Slater, 19, an apprentice bricklayer from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, went missing after attending a music festival on the island four weeks ago. He was last seen walking alone in the Rural de Teno national park, a rugged and remote area on the opposite side of the island to the holiday resort where he had been staying with friends.
The statement said: “Guardia Civil agents belonging to Mountain Rescue and Intervention Group located in this morning the lifeless body of a young man in the Masca area, belonging to the municipality of Buenavista del Norte.”
It went on to suggest the person “could have died due to [an] accidental fall on the cliff and inaccessible area where [the body] had been found”.
Spanish police said that for 29 days, different units of the Guardia Civil had run a “constant search … to look for the young man every day in the area of Masca” and would await the results of an autopsy to confirm the cause of death.
A search and rescue operation was launched on the island after Slater was reported missing on 17 June. The police in Spain said they were scaling down the search two weeks later but the case remained open.
Volunteer rescuers had continued to look for the teenager, with some Britons flying out to help. Police had previously used helicopters, dogs and drones to look for Slater but rescue teams said the terrain had made the job particularly difficult.
“It’s so big [here] that it’s very difficult to search in such a steep area. But we’re doing everything we can,” one member of the rescue team told the Guardian. He said it was a “very difficult area to search”, with many areas covered in vegetation, as well as there being gaps and ravines.
In Slater’s last known contact with friends, he made a phone call saying he was lost, thirsty, and had only 1% left on his phone battery. After the music festival, he had gone with some men he had met that night and was last seen close to the holiday home they had rented on the island.
Ofelia Medina Hernandez, whose brother owns the Airbnb, said Slater had asked her about the times of buses back to Los Cristianos, and she had later seen him walking uphill in the opposite direction to the coastal resort.
“It’s dangerous walking around here, it’s easy to lose yourself,” she said. “He walked along the road when I saw him for the last time, up there … He was there alone. He was walking normally, though fast, a little fast.”
Slater’s mother, Debbie Duncan, described in a statement on Sunday the “heartache” her “normal family from Lancashire” continued to suffer, and criticised “the constant barrage of conspiracy theories and wild speculation” that had flourished online since his disappearance and compounded the family’s grief.
“As we approach four weeks of our beautiful Jay’s disappearance, we cannot put into words the heartache we are suffering as a family,. He is loved by everyone and has a close bond with his family and many, many friends,” she said.
“It’s important to consider how the family will feel when horrific things are being posted online,” she added, saying: “It must end.”
The statement was issued via LBT Global, a British overseas missing persons charity that has been working with the family.
According to Tenerife’s El Día newspaper, the terrain where the body was found was so inaccessible that a helicopter from the regional government’s emergency rescue service was used to help recover the remains.
A spokesperson for the Guardia Civil said one of its mountain rescue search teams had found the body while carrying out a search on the ground.
LBT Global said on Monday the body had been found close to the site of the last known location of Slater’s mobile phone.
“Although formal identification is yet to be carried out, the body was found with Mr Slater’s possessions and clothes,” it said. “A postmortem and forensic inquiries will follow.”
