Staff Reporter
THE search continued on Wednesday in Tenerife to find Jay Slater, a 19-year-old Brit who was on holiday in the Canary Islands when he went missing in a national park on Monday.
According to UK press reports, Slater posted a picture on social network Snapchat just an hour before he phoned a friend to say that he had got lost.
The apprentice bricklayer, who is from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, had been at a music festival called NrG in the south of the island.
He is then thought to have got into a car with ‘two English lads’ he had met in the early hours of Monday morning, before going to their accommodation in the Rural de Teno park.
Read more: Timeline of disappearance of British tourist Jay Slater
Slater made a call to a friend at just before 9am on Monday, to say that he was lost and was rapidly running out of phone battery.
The call dropped and the youngster has not been heard from since.
He was reportedly trying to walk home, but was located some 10 or 11 hours by foot from where he was staying when contact was lost.
The picture that he posted at 7.30am on Monday morning showed a blurry hand holding a cigarette, according to the Daily Mail.
The 19-year-old’s mother, Debbie Duncan, has flown into the Canary Islands as the search continues. Since she arrived, she said that she feared he could have been kidnapped.
“I think he’s been taken against his will with what’s been said, but it’s in the hands of the police,” she said in comments reported by The Mirror.
Police confirmed to reporters on Wednesday that they had shifted their search away from the park to the south of Tenerife near to where he was staying.
Slater’s family have also called on people not to donate to fake fundraisers that have been set up claiming to help to find him, and have reportedly been targeted by cruel online trolls as the search continues.
