Jay Slater’s best pals Lucy Mae Law and Brad Hargreaves fly home to UK as teen’s desperate family continues search
JAY Slater’s best pals have reportedly flown home to the UK as the missing Brit’s family continue their desperate search.
Brad Hargreaves and Lucy Mae Law arrived in Tenerife with Jay back in June as the trio partied at the NRG music festival before the teen mysteriously vanished without a trace.
Brad jetted away from the Spanish island three weeks after he last heard from Jay in a chilling phone call.
He revealed he heard the 19-year-old slipping on rocks in a video call just hours before he was reported as missing to cops.
Brad has since returned to his family home in Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire alongside his mum who flew out to help in the search.
Rachel said once she arrived to the island that Brad is “not really coping” with Jay’s disappearance.
It is understood Lucy, 18, headed home some time earlier after doing all she could to help in the now four week search.
Taking to her Instagram for the first time since Jay vanished, Lucy posted a snap of the pair together with a crying face emoji last week.
Lucy was also the one who set up a GoFundMe to raise money for Jay and to help fund the search.
It has since reached over £50,000.
Jay was said to have been staying with Brad and Lucy at a holiday apartment in Los Cristianos.
On June 16, the night before his tragic disappearance, the trio were partying at the Papagayo nightclub late into the night.
Brad and Lucy are believed to have called it a day as they headed back to their apartment – leaving Jay with two men they had met during the festival.
The missing Brit was seen leaving club with the older men heading to a secluded Airbnb hours away from where his pals were in Masca.
One of the men is convicted drug dealer Ayub Qassim who has since been dubbed “Johnny Vegas” by private investigators.
The other man is still unknown.
Officials are still unsure why he chose to go back to the Airbnb instead of returning to his apartment in Los Cristianos with one theory suggesting Jay had lost his room key.
Messages from Ayub, seen by The Sun, show that Jay had complained to him about losing his key on the night out.
Ayub then offered the teen a place to crash for the night as he drove Jay home and put him up on the sofa in the living room.
A final Snapchat picture from Jay shows him sitting outside the Airbnb smoking a cigarette given to him by Ayub.
The morning after, Ayub claims Jay turned down a lift back to his apartment saying he was going to catch a bus as he was hungry.
It has since been claimed by ex detective Mark Williams-Thomas – who has been working on the case for weeks – that Jay left in a panic and was “scared” to return.
Jay then decided to try and make the 11-hour trek back to Los Cristianos on foot after he seemingly couldn’t catch a bus.
During his rocky walk, Jay phoned both Lucy and Brad.
Brad told ITV’s This Morning he didn’t think anything was wrong during their talk over Snapchat.
But he did say he could hear Jay’s feet slide on the rocks during the chat.
Brad said: “That’s how I knew he went off the road because, you know when you walk on gravel, or whatever it is, you can… you know what I mean, stones.
“We were both, like, laughing about it. He said: ‘look where I am’.”
He has faced daily vile messages from online trolls since with people probing him over his friend’s disappearance.
In a statement Brad said: “We ain’t drug mules or whatever…. people need to know the facts before talking s*** on the internet…”
After speaking to Brad, Jay then got a second phone call from Lucy at around 8:50am.
She claims he appeared panicked on the call – telling her he was lost and thirsty, his phone was about to die and that he’d been cut by a cactus.
His phone later died with its final ping coming from the Rural de Teno park – a mountainous region close-by.
Bizarrely, Qassim says he had a phone call from an unnamed friend of Jays, saying he was “in a ditch” somewhere and had been “cut by a cactus”.
Lucy then says she went to the Airbnb in the days after the disappearance where she met the two men and spoke about Jay.
It’s just a riddle and I don’t know the outcome. We’re going round and round in circles
Warren Slater
Jay hasn’t been seen since despite a mammoth two-week search operation across the island.
The Spanish Guardia Civil finally halted their search in Masca just over a week ago but have insisted the investigation remains open.
The drastic end to the hunt led to the family taking matters into their own hands.
Desperate dad Warren, 58, has remained hopeful that they will find Jay but has been vocal about the family’s anguish over the case.
He blasted the search operation as he claimed “everything stinks” amid fears other people are involved in his son’s disappearance.
“It’s just a riddle and I don’t know the outcome,” Warren added.
“We’re going round and round in circles.”
He continued telling the Manchester Evening News: “From the bnb, he’s a fit lad, 25 minutes you can get to the top, to where the cafe is. If he’s followed the road and been where we’ve been today, it’s took him an hour and a half.
“Dozens of cars would have gone past him. We got here at 9am and the 10am bus passed us. And it would have passed him. I’ve been up here three weeks and I’ve never seen as many cars.”
Jay’s uncle Glen Duncan has also angrily hit out at the police investigation – saying he wished he could “burst into the police station” amid fears a “third party” could have been involved.
Yesterday, Warren warned it would take “an army 10 years” to search the whole area as he pleaded with Interpol and British cops to help.
Warren – joined by Glen and older brother Zak – are now searching a town in Tenerife where the teen was allegedly spotted nine hours after he disappeared.
They focused their efforts in the town of Santiago del Teide which made headlines several weeks ago when apparent CCTV footage caught Jay wandering across the road.
The mysterious case of Jay Slater
By Ellie Doughty, Foreign News Reporter
Monday July 8 marked three weeks since Jay Slater, a 19-year-old from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, vanished in Tenerife.
The apprentice bricklayer, who flew out to the popular holiday island for a rave festival with friends Lucy Law and Brad Page, has made headlines around the country.
On Sunday June 16 the three of them headed off to one of the events at Papagayo nightclub.
In the early hours of Monday 17 – Lucy and Brad were ready to head back to their hotel, but Jay wanted to keep partying.
It was then that he left the south of the island and headed to an Airbnb in the northwest with two British men.
The Sun revealed the identity of one of them – convicted drug dealer Ayub Qassim, who spent nine years behind bars in the UK.
For days it was thought that the second mystery man went by the name ‘Johnny Vegas’.
On Sunday former detective Mark Williams-Thomas, who is out in Tenerife investigating, said Qassim told him he is in fact the man behind the nickname ‘Johnny Vegas’.
We don’t yet know the identity of the second man – who remains a key part of the puzzle in Jay’s mysterious disappearance.
Qassim claims he drove Jay and the friend back to their accommodation and said they all went to sleep.
In the morning he offered to drive the teen back to the Los Cristianos resort after a nap, but Jay, hungry and tired, said he wanted to leave immediately.
Lucy, the last person to speak to Jay, claims she had a panicked call from him soon after he left the holiday let, telling her he was lost and thirsty, his phone was about to die and that he’d been cut by a cactus.
Jay had been seen by the owner of the Airbnb that morning wandering around near the Rural de Teno park – a mountainous region close-by.
He is believed to have been attempting the 11-hour trek back to his hotel, despite the alleged offer of a lift and more buses scheduled for the day.
It was there that his phone last pinged – and he hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
Mark Williams-Thomas has claimed he left the Airbnb quickly, and was “scared”.
Bizarrely, Qassim says he was woken up that morning by a phone call from an unnamed friend of Jay, saying he was “in a ditch” somewhere and had been “cut by a cactus”.
Jay’s friend Lucy claimed to have “tracked down” the two men in the Airbnb after he vanished – quizzing them on the morning of Jay’s disappearance.
Some reports have suggested Lucy knew the two men, although it is not clear how.
She has dubbed his disappearance “weird and suspicious”.
Both men were questioned by Spanish cops on June 17 but quickly deemed “irrelevant” to the investigation and cleared to fly back to the UK.
Police spent almost two weeks searching for Jay in the Tenerife mountains, scouring a 2,000ft ravine, before calling it off on Sunday June 30.
Jay’s family have repeatedly slammed the Spanish investigation into his bizarre disappearance.
His uncle, Glen Duncan, is convinced of “third party involvement”.
And the teen’s devastated dad, Warren Slater, says “everything stinks”
He told The Sun: “My starting position, I’ve said this from day one, ask the two men who’ve taken him – and then start from there.”
A number of unanswered questions remain, over why Jay would have travelled so far with two older men he didn’t know, why said men would have taken him in, and why he braved the Tenerife mountains with no phone battery, water or heat protection for a day-long walk