Police in Tenerife have said the unsuccessful two-week search in the mountains for a missing British teenager is now over, although the case remains open.
Jay Slater, 19, from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, went missing on Monday 17 June after attending a weekend rave with friends.
Since then, emergency services, mountain rescue teams, sniffer dogs, drones and helicopters have taken part in searches for Slater culminating in what was described as a “búsqueda masiva” – massive search – on Saturday.
It has emerged that that search was essentially one last push in coordinated attempts to locate Slater.
On Sunday, a spokesperson for the Guardia Civil in Tenerife said the search operation for Slater had finished, but the case remained open.
Slater, an apprentice bricklayer, had been holidaying in Tenerife with friends and went to the three-day NRG Tenerife Weekender festival at venues in the island’s Playa de las Americas resort.
In the early hours of the Monday morning, he apparently left the resort in a car with two British men and headed to an Airbnb property in Masca, a remote hilltop hamlet in the north-west of the island.
He was last heard from at about 8.15am when he told a friend, Lucy Law, that he planned to walk back to his holiday accommodation after missing a bus, a journey that would take him 10-11 hours on foot.
Slater also said he was thirsty, had 1% of charge left on his phone and did not know where he was.
The search on Saturday centred around valleys and ravines in the mountainous, treacherous, cactus-filled terrain near Masca in the Rural de Teno national park.
The authorities had asked for help from professionals such as civil protection workers or firefighters as well as volunteers with expertise in that type of terrain. According to the BBC, about a dozen people arrived at the designated meeting point. No sign of Slater was found.
It also emerged on Friday that one of Slater’s last calls was a video call to another friend, Brad Hargreaves, who told ITV that he heard Slater apparently sliding off the path he was on.
“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 you back, I’ll ring you back’ because I think someone else was ringing him.
“If he was thinking like me, he would have gone back up and started walking on the path again … He wouldn’t have gone all that way down there.”
Hargreaves said he could hear his friend sliding. “I knew he went off the road because I could hear like when you walk on gravel … stones,” he added.
The authorities in Tenerife said they had spoken to the two men who rented the Airbnb in Masca and they were “not in any way relevant to the case”.
As well as dealing with the distress of a missing loved one, the family and friends of the teenager have had to deal with lots of “online noise” around the case, including bizarre and far-fetched conspiracy theories.
In a previous interview with the Guardian, Slater’s mother, Debbie Duncan, described the online speculation as “horrible” and said Spanish police had told her it may hinder their investigation.
“I think as well they have actually said that there’s too much noise, that’s affecting it,” she said.
