This Jay Slater discover raises extra questions than it solutions: FRED KELLY

After 29 days of tension and torment for the family of Jay Slater, a body has been found in the remote mountainous region of Tenerife where he disappeared.

Shortly after midday yesterday, Spanish authorities on the island released a brief statement confirming that ‘agents belonging to the Civil Guard’ had discovered the remains of a young man.

While police have stressed they are awaiting official identification, the Mail understands that this is little more than a formality.

We can now say, with some certainty, that what was discovered at around 10am yesterday by a mountain rescue unit, were the remains of the 19-year-old trainee bricklayer from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire. 

The body was found in a ravine within the Rural de Reno Park near Masca village. While the exact location and cause of death have yet to be disclosed, the statement says that Jay ‘could have died due to an accidental fall in the steep and inaccessible area where he was found’.

A T-shirt and shorts matching those Jay was wearing at the time of his disappearance were also found, and his possessions were also said to have been recovered.

However, the authorities are yet to release an itemised list, and we do not know whether his phone was among them. The Mail understands that the body was discovered by officers working mainly for the Greim mountain team.

And, although the official, large-scale search had been halted after two weeks on June 30, these elite officers had covertly continued their work.

The body was lifted out of the ravine – described by police as ‘steep and inaccessible’ – by a helicopter belonging to a regional government emergency and rescue group.

It will probably now be transported to the northern city of La Laguna where an autopsy will be performed in the coming days.

In Spanish territories such as the Canary Islands, the results of post-mortem examinations are not typically made public but are instead sent to an investigating magistrate.

In this case, the Civil Guard has been reporting to a court in the town of Icod de los Vinos, which will receive the results. As and when those results will be made public is unclear.

Jay had been missing since the morning of Monday, June 17. He had partied until the early hours at the Papagayo nightclub in the south of the island, on a notorious party strip, Veronicas, in Playa de Las Americas.

It was the final night of the three-day New Rave Generation music festival that Jay and three friends – Lucy Mae Law, Bradley Hargreaves and Brandon Hodgson – had flown out to attend.

After the event ended at around 5am, Jay chose not to return to his nearby accommodation. Instead, he got in the back seat of a rental Seat Leon and was driven 25 miles north, just beyond the small village of Masca, to the Casa Abuela Tina, a £40-a-night Airbnb.

The property had been rented by the two men in the front seats of the car: convicted drug dealer and British national, Ayub Qassim, and an unknown associate who goes by the nickname Johnny Vegas. (A claim last week that Qassim and Vegas were the same person has since been discredited.) The Spanish police have now said these men are ‘not relevant’ to the investigation.

At around 7.30am, Jay posted two pictures of himself on Snapchat outside Casa Abuela Tina and half an hour later he was spotted at a bus stop by Ofelia Medina Hernandez, whose brother owns the property.

She later told reporters that she informed Jay the bus would not arrive until 10am. At this point, he apparently set off on foot. The journey home would have taken 11 hours – a virtual impossibility in the ferocious heat. Strangely, he took the winding tarmac road north, though this meant walking in the wrong direction for his accommodation in the south.

Mark Williams-Thomas, the former police officer who led his own unofficial investigation, noted that it is the route suggested by the navigation app, Apple Maps, downloaded on the teen’s smartphone.

At 8.50am, shortly after he called Lucy Mae Law to say he was ‘lost in the mountains, with no water and 1 per cent battery’, Jay’s phone ‘pinged’ for the last time – not far from the road in a dense thicket of cacti and brambles.

So, after four weeks of speculation and competing theories online and in the Press, where does that leave us?

The discovery of the body yesterday should provide closure and it should allow Jay’s family to grieve. However, having spent two weeks in Tenerife investigating this case myself, I have been dumbfounded by the nature of this discovery.

The truth is, the discovery of Jay Slater’s body raises more questions than it does answers.

Missing persons charity LBT Global, which has been acting on behalf of Jay’s family, released a statement yesterday claiming: ‘The body was found close to the site of his mobile phone’s last location.’

I know, from my own investigation, that Jay Slater’s phone last ‘pinged’ in an area of thicket no more than a hundred yards from the major arterial road connecting the village of Masca to the north coast. This is a busy, winding thoroughfare.

During time I spent on Tenerife reporting on this story for the Mail, I visited this exact location on no fewer than four occasions. It is a little more than a mile north of the Airbnb Jay was taken to in the early hours of June 17.

Every time I visited, the area was crawling with local hikers and tourists, amateur sleuths and international journalists. It was a hive of activity. I even joined the scores of people who walked directly through the cacti-ridden thicket where the body has now been found. I saw nothing. In fact, over almost a month, the thousands who visited this spot noticed nothing untoward.

Indeed, the official police search and rescue mission – which lasted two weeks and was completed on June 30 – focused on the area where the body is said to have been found. They even had expert sniffer dogs flown in from Spain – the best of the best in this terrain, we were all told.

So just how could the body of a young man suddenly be found in area that had been meticulously searched for weeks? Indeed, some of those searching the ravine speculated that if a body were there, it would attract local birds of prey, giving away its position.

Jay’s remains may indeed have been discovered in a ‘steep and inaccessible area’ – and certainly, pictures emerged yesterday of mountain-rescue experts working in extremely challenging and difficult terrain, before removing the body by helicopter.

The truly treacherous, even lethal, part of the ravine is where it drops into the sea, and where the rugged, Los Gigantes cliffs – nicknamed the ‘Wall of Hell’ – reach 600 metres into the sky.

Unless Jay indeed somehow found his way here, it is extremely difficult to imagine how one could have a fatal accident at the flatter top of the ravine, although they could of course pass out here from heat and exhaustion.

Jay was likely dangerously dehydrated and conceivably under the influence of class A drugs.

Photos from the Papagayo nightclub show his jaw locked to the side in the hours before his disappearance, suggesting ketamine abuse. Should the post mortem examination be able to provide such detail, it would not surprise me if it confirmed that a drug and dehydration-induced delirium had played a significant part in his demise.

Even sober, and with plenty of water and food, I found the unrelenting heat and disorientating geography of the ravine to be challenging. One can only imagine how Jay felt.

There have long been rumours that malign actors played a role in Jay’s disappearance.

The boy’s apparent knowledge of serious players in the European drugs trade raised suspicions that – as I wrote in these pages – he may have either fallen foul of their gangster codes and either been trafficked off the island or possibly murdered.

It might therefore be foolhardy to rule out the possibility that the body could have been planted in the thicket over recent days.

Let’s not forget that Jay allegedly stole a Rolex watch from an ‘eastern European man’ outside the Papagayo Nightclub before being driven into the hills. And, indeed, that Mark Williams-Thomas said Jay was ‘clearly worried about his own safety’.

Furthermore, the official statement from Spanish Mountain Rescue and the local Civil Guard states that the body was found after ’29 days of constant search’. They add that the discovery was only possible ‘thanks to the incessant and discreet search’ of local authorities.

Again, this raises a slew of questions. Why, if the authorities were continuing their search, would they officially announce the end of the search and rescue mission on June 30? And why, on every single occasion my colleagues in the Press and I visited the area, was there no sign of this supposed ongoing search?

A spokesman for the Greim mountain rescue team, understood to have found the body, said: ‘The large-scale operation involving multiple units had been suspended but as we always said, we never stopped looking for Jay.’

This too raises issues of transparency. Let us not forget that it was due to the belief that the authorities had too hastily halted their search that so many volunteers put themselves in harm’s way and undertook their own expeditions.

Former British military reservist, Chris Pennington, whom I interviewed last week, himself got lost in the ravine on Saturday while searching for the teenager.

‘I was exhausted from the heat,’ Pennington told the Press. ‘Extremely tired, and couldn’t make my way through.’

Individuals such as him put themselves in danger on the case because they thought the professionals had given up on the job. It is no exaggeration to say that the teenager’s disappearance has gripped the nation.

Perhaps, with hindsight, it is easy to see why. The case was full of intrigue. It was a story of shadowy narco-gangsters set in a remote wilderness on an island that for decades thousands of Britons have called their second-home.

But with the fascination has come a darker side, too. The internet has been awash with conspiracy theories. Indeed, as a journalist working on the case, I have been approached by people with utterly outlandish proposals, including fancifully suggesting that Jay may have had his vital organs harvested and sold.

Such wild speculation has, of course, taken a great toll on Jay’s mother, Debbie Duncan.

In a statement last Sunday through LBT Global, she criticised the ‘awful comments and conspiracy theories’ surrounding the case. ‘We cannot put into words the heartache we are suffering as a family,’ she continued, before concluding that her son was ‘loved by everyone and has a close bond with his family and many many friends’.

We can only hope that the heartache Debbie and the family – brother Zak and father Warren – are feeling will begin to abate now that the body of their beloved son has been found.

But until the myriad of puzzling, unanswered questions is addressed, I sense there will no true closure for the Slater family – or the millions gripped by this tragic tale.