An Army expert has warned over "dangerous" places Jay Slater search terms never scoured in a bid to find the 19-year-old, who vanished last month. Christopher Pennington, a former British military serviceman, moved to the Spanish island in 2006.
Mr Pennington, who spoke out this week to a UK tabloid newspaper website amid the ongoing family search for the missing apprentice bricklayer, is among the volunteers who are still carrying on the search through the treacherous land in the north west of Tenerife.
To put himself in Jay's shoes, Chris followed the route exactly from the coastal party strip, south of the island. At 5.30am on Saturday, he followed the winding road north in his car from Papagayo nightclub to the Casa Abuela Tina Airbnb in Masca.
READ MORE Jay Slater's phone may have been 'thrown' in Tenerife ravine where he vanished
He told the Mail that he didn't exceed 15km an hour, because of the hairpin turns. "I've worked out the most sensible places to search," Chris said. "You can see two large palm trees roughly one hundred yards from one another.
"Through a source, I have the precise geolocation where Jay's phone last pinged. And it's somewhere between those two trees." He said: "You can only imagine that he's looked down at the coastline in the distance and thinks it's a lot closer than it really is. And that heading straight through the bush is the quickest route to safety."
He said: "If Jay came off the path and went through there, like I've just done, he wouldn't leave the path again. You'd have to be mad." "This area has not been searched properly," he declared to Mail+.
Another local who has been trekking the area with Warren and Zak is Juan Garcia, a 53-year-old who has been searching along with his four-year-old sniffer dog, Caperucita. Speaking of the treacherous conditions, he harrowingly told the Mail it would be near-impossible for search teams to locate him from above. "It's a labyrinth of bushes and you can't see much from the air. We really are looking for a needle in a haystack," he said.
