Jay Slater search continues as Tenerife police urged not to ignore important lead

Police in Tenerife and the UK have been urged to probe claims missing teen Jay Slater was involved in a £12,000 Rolex theft.

Jay from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire vanished on the Spanish island of Tenerife on June 17 but despite a huge search he’s still not been found.

New details have now emerged, with former detective Mark Williams-Thomas - who is unofficially looking into the disappearance of the 19-year-old apprentice bricklayer - revealing that he’d admitted the theft of the watch to his friends.

But The Sun has reported that UK police aren’t investigating it and Tenerife cops are declining to discuss it. The paper says it has also been given the name of a British gangster who has mutual friends with Jay involved in the watch trade on the holiday island. 

A source told the publication: “The Spanish police have failed to pick up all the threads and it’s time British detectives stepped in.

“Jay might have gone missing on Tenerife but many of the people he crossed paths with are British.”

Meanwhile a former officer of the British Army has suggested that Jay Slater's mobile might have been "thrown" before his disappearance. 

He was last spotted departing an Airbnb located close to Masca village, around eight in the morning.

His mobile last signalled its position somewhere within the Parque Rural de Teno nature reserve. Before they abandoned their official search last week, Spanish police had focused their efforts there. His family are continuing to search.

Now a new theory has come to light from a journalist Nick Pisa who is following Jay's case in Tenerife. Based on a conversation with an ex-British Army officer Pisa says that Jay's phone might have been thrown into difficult terrain. 

He said: "We're not obviously being kept up to speed, but [the former officer] did tell me that he thought where the ping came from was rather surprising because it was really steep to get to, and it was covered in undergrowth and cacti," he told GB News.

The former officer added that one would require a machete to get to the location or, he suggested, someone might have flung the phone into that thick vegetation.

Jay’s friend Lucy Mae Law, who was with Jay in the Canary Islands, was among the last to hear from him at approximately 8am on the day he disappeared. 

He contacted her to say he was making his way back on foot after missing the bus, saying he was thirsty and tired, had sustained a cut from a cactus and that his phone battery was nearly dead.