Jay Slater could be alive “drinking water and eating plants”, a private investigator has claimed. Army reservist and private investigator Juan García also told The Times that “the family should not give up hope” and that it was “too premature” to call off the police search.
The 53-year-old said he had “spoken directly to the family and offered my advice”.
The teenager went missing after a rave on the Spanish island of Tenerife. He was last seen around 8am on June 17, when he tried to make his way back to his holiday accommodation.
He had been attending a three-day NRG festival, which ended the day before at the Papagayo beach club, in the south of the island.
Lucy, a friend of the 19-year-old who attended the festival with him, said Slater, of Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, went to stay with people he met after the night out.
Lucy received a phone call from Jay at about 8am on Monday morning saying he had missed his bus and was trying to walk back but was lost, needed a drink and only had 1 percent battery on his phone. The phone call then cut off.
The phone died at about 8.50am and his last known location was registered in the remote Rural de Teno park, more than 10 miles from the popular resort Guía de Isora.
Mountain rescue crews and sniffer dogs searched the mountainous area in the north-west of Tenerife until shifting focus to the tourist hotspots of Los Cristianos and Playa de Las Americas in the south, after an alleged sighting of him getting out of a taxi.
This report was later found to be false and police, having wasted time in temperatures of nearly 30C, moved their attention back to the original site.
Slater is one of 11 people missing on the island in the last six months, including 27-year old Mariel Gonzalez Gutierrez and two-year old Sebastian Cobos Gonzalez, who vanished in late March, and Polish national Marek Sidelecki, who was reported missing on June 14.