Staff Reporter
THE father of missing Brit Jay Slater has called for Interpol to get involved in the case, more than three weeks after the 19-year-old bricklayer vanished without trace on the Canary Island of Tenerife.
“We need to, as a full family, do a proper press conference and ask the British authorities to help,” Warren Slater, 54, told The Sun. “He’s a British citizen. Get Interpol involved.”
Jay Slater disappeared after he attended a rave on the night of June 16 with friends, before travelling to an AirBnB in Masca with two men.
He reportedly set off to walk home to his accommodation, which was located some 11 kilometres away by foot.
After he vanished, the Spanish authorities used dogs, drones and helicopters to try and find him over the space of a 13-day search, which was called off on June 30.
Read more: Jay Slater search is called off in Spain
“It’s just us. I haven’t got a team,” Warren Slater said. “We need a team to come over here and find out for us what the police are doing and what we need to do.
“It’ll take an army 10 years to cover all this,” he said, in reference to the Rural de Teno park where Jay was last heard from.
“I’d employ a team of Gurkhas,” he added.
Earlier this week Warren Slater spent around six hours searching a mountainside for Jay. He was accompanied by his son Zak, 24.
The pair were searching an area on Monday where Jay’s cellphone last pinged a tower, and which is also the area from which he sent his location to a friend, Lucy May Law, 19.
They then turned their attentions to a town in Tenerife, where there have been reports that Jay was spotted some nine hours after he vanished.
According to Jay’s mum, Debbie Duncan, a witness told police that they had seen Jay in Santiago del Teide on the same day he went missing, according to The Sun.
Grainy CCTV footage also shows someone in the same area, with Jay’s family claiming it could be him.
One of the two men that Jay was with at the AirBnB in Masca before his disappearance was identified by MailOnline as a convicted drug dealer called Ayub Qassim.
But Qassim, 31, claims that Jay ‘arrived alive and left alive’.
Police investigating the case did not consider Qassim or his as-yet-unidentified companion to be pertinent to their investigation, something that has baffled the family and other investigators.
There have been calls from the family for the UK police to interview Qassim and to locate the other man.
The Spanish police in Tenerife, meanwhile, said that the investigation into the disappearance remains ‘open’ but they have refused to state whether or not they think there was foul play or any criminal element involved.
