JAY SLATER: AIRBNB PAL'S CRUCIAL 5-WORD STATEMENT ABOUT LAST MOMENTS WITH TEEN

One of the men at the centre of Jay Slater's missing case broke his silence to share details of his final sighting of the teen.

Ayub Qassim, 31, was one of two British men who invited Jay back to their Airbnb rental home in the village of Masca in Tenerife, in the early hours of Monday, June 17, before the teen went missing. Mr Qassim booked the £40-a-night holiday let and took Jay, who had been on the Spanish island for the three-day NRG festival, back to the property in a rental car.

The Civil Guard spoke to Mr Qassim and his unnamed friend after Jay, 19, vanished and ruled them out from their investigation. Head of the mountain rescue unit, Cipriano Martin, said last Saturday - before the active search party was called off on Sunday: "Those men have been spoken to and they don't have any relevance whatsoever for the case."

At around 8am on the morning Jay went missing, he left the rental home and rang his friend Lucy Mae Law, who he travelled with to the Canary Islands, to tell her that he was walking back to their accommodation after missing the bus. During his journey, which would have taken him 11 hours on foot through rough terrain, the Lancashire teen seemingly disappeared.

Breaking his silence on Jay, Mr Qassim confirmed to MailOnline that Jay was alive when he left the house in the Rural de Teno area on the northern side of the island. He said Jay arrived at the house alive and, crucially: "He left the house alive." Ayub and his companion are understood to have stayed in Tenerife for another day after Jay vanished to speak to Spanish police.

Mr Qassim added: "I let the geezer stay at mine because he had nowhere else to go, his friends had all left him. I know Jay, through friends, I'm not going to bring someone back to mine if I don't know them. I'm doing the geezer a favour and now my face is all over the news. It's a bit mental. I haven't even done anything."

Mr Qassim, who is back at his home in Barking, east London, denied that he had an argument with Jay. It was initially reported that Jay met the pair the night before he went missing, while out with friends. But in an interview with ITV's crime reporter Isla Traquair, Jay's friend Brad Hargreaves confirmed they had met three days earlier.

In her report on Saturday, Isla said: "The two men that he went to go and stay with, they had met them three days before. They hung out with them, they made friends on holiday. It wasn't two random people he'd met that night. They'd established a friendship and Brad said they seemed like really cool guys."

In an interview the day after Jay's disappearance, his pal Lucy said: "He's gone on a night out, he's gone to a friend's house, someone that he has met on holiday. One of the people he has met has hired a car out of here, so he's driven them back to his apartment and Jay has gone there not realising how far away it is. He's ended up out in the middle of nowhere.

"Jay was obviously thinking he would be able to get home from there. But then in the morning he's set off walking, using his Maps on his phone and ended up in the middle of mountains with nothing around. He rang me at about 8 o'clock morning saying his phone was on 1 percent. He said 'I don't know where I am, I need a drink and my phone is about to die'."

The young woman managed to locate the Airbnb on the day of his vanishing, after using markers in Jay's last Snapchat image. She approached the two men who were still inside the property. She said: "We managed to find the house. I knocked on the door and there were two people there." They said Jay had gone out for a cigarette before going back in and saying he wanted to go home.

"They told me he'd spoken to the next-door neighbours and they'd told him there was a bus every 10 minutes back down to Los Cristianos," said Lucy. "The bus stop was right next to the house. So obviously if he'd gone to get the bus he wouldn't have got lost because it [the stop] was visible from the front door. The two boys that he was last with have left the country."

2024-07-04T11:23:07Z dg43tfdfdgfd