Missing British tourist found ‘safe and well’ after vanishing from Spain’s Costa del Sol

A MISSING British tourist has been found safe and well on the Costa del Sol.

Juaad Arif, 23, from Manchester, was last seen on June 8 when he had a video call with his family.

His ‘worried’ mum Zahida, 47, then reported him missing on Friday, speaking to the Olive Press.

Juaad, a Chartered Accounting student at Manchester University, was reunited with his family on Monday.

The Oldham-born traveller, who has been in Spain since mid-October, wound up in a Spanish prison.

Zahida told the Olive Press that her son, who is nicknamed ‘Buffy’, had been jailed after failing to pay the fine for a traffic offence.

The mother-of-five tracked Juaad down with the help of a security guard from an address in Benahavis, where the Brit is believed to have been house-sitting for a pal.

The unidentified good Samaritan heard from a policeman that Juaad had been taken away by police.

Juaad’s family have now paid his ‘bail’ and Zahida confirmed that he would be on one of the first available flights back to the UK.

“I am absolutely relieved,” she told the Olive Press this week, “he is safe and well.”

She added: “We owe the gentleman, the security guard, quite a bit.

“He’s been searching for him [Juaad] for a week, a policeman told him that he’d been sent to jail for not paying a traffic fine.

“Where Juaad was house-sitting was a private villa and they employ a security guard who saw the police.”

Juaad was last pictured in black sunglasses and a black North Face sweater on a roof terrace on the day of his disappearance.

Zahida added that during her son’s time behind bars he had been denied a phone call, despite his Spanish and English phones being out of battery.

She said: “They didn’t let him call anyone and he didn’t have his phone with him.

“Every country has a different way of doing things.

“We go abroad quite a bit, so we the laws can be different, but you are usually allowed one phone call.”