Friends of missing teenager Jay Slater urge UK police to help search

Friends of missing Tenerife teenager Jay Slater have urged British police to help investigate his disappearance, as the search for him enters its fifth day.

Jay Slater, 19, from Lancashire, told a friend he would walk home after missing a bus on Monday morning following a night out.

His friend Lucy Law told the BBC she feared he was in “grave danger”.

“He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he doesn’t have sunscreen, he doesn’t have water, he doesn’t have a coat,” she said. “He’s not prepared for any of the weather conditions here. It’s not safe.”

In the same interview, she asked British police to help with the investigation, so that “we can bring him home to his family.”

She also told Mirror: “We need the British police here. I just want to find my mate. He's been missing for three days. It's not looking good now. We feel like it’s up to us to find him and that we’re doing more than the police.”

Ms Law previously told Sky News that Mr Slater called her at around 8.30am on Monday and told her he was “lost in the mountains, he was not aware of his surroundings, he desperately needed a glass and his phone was on 1 per cent”.

She added that he “cut his leg on a cactus and he didn’t know where it was.”

She said the 19-year-old had gone to stay with people he had met on Sunday evening who were staying in an apartment “miles from civilization and in a very isolated location”.

The 40 km (25 mile) journey – from a nature reserve in the north of the Spanish island to his apartment in the southern town of Los Cristianos – should have taken 11 hours on foot.

A family friend said The Guardian: “Even if they had 30,000 people here, it's like a needle in a haystack,” adding that they spent 12 hours on Wednesday hiking all the trails around his last known location.

The newspaper also quotes Ms Law as saying: “I just think they need to get as much help as possible here.”

“There are no helicopters here 1718965345. He's been missing for so long now, what are they really doing?

Mr Slater's mother, Debbie Duncan, flew to Tenerife on Tuesday morning to help with the search.

Ms Duncan said she believed her son had “been taken against his will” but was “in the hands of the police”.

She told ITV News: “It's just a nightmare, it's a real living nightmare.

“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. I just want my baby back. Please anyone who can help – look it up. It's a huge area up there. He's out there somewhere or someone knows where he is.

Ms Duncan added: “I wish I hadn’t encouraged him to go. I should have said, “Don’t go to Tenerife.”

“I just think he was probably still in a good mood, buzzing – he doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know the extent of the long journey he took to get there.

“And he just thought, 'I'm going to walk.' And that's apparently what he told the last person he contacted.

Ms Duncan described her son, who worked as an apprentice bricklayer, as “handsome” and a “popular boy” and that he was “a great person who everyone wanted to be with”.

A spokeswoman for the Spanish Civil Guard said I: “We are searching on the ground this morning again in the same area as yesterday. We are not ruling out any possibility.