#UPDATED at 14.45 on Tues 16 July:
An autopsy has confirmed that the body found on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Monday is that of the missing British teenager Jay Slater.
A fingerprint examination carried out by Spanish officials ‘confirms that the body is that of Jay Slater’, British overseas missing persons charity LBT Global said in a statement.
A post-mortem found that ‘Jay died of injuries consistent with an accidental fall from a considerable height’, LBT’s chief executive Matthew Searle said.
Jay Slater, a 19-year-old from Oswaldtwistle village in northwest England, was in Tenerife to attend the NRG dance music festival with two friends in the Playa de las Americas resort before going missing as he tried to walk back to his accommodation on 17 June.
The apprentice bricklayer had been staying at an Airbnb in Masca, a small mountain village on the island’s northwest perched on the top of a steep ravine that plunges down to the sea.
Media reports said he rang friends during the early hours of 17 June to say he was lost and had very little battery left.
‘I just can’t believe this could happen to my beautiful boy. Our hearts are broken,’ Slater’s mother Debbie was quoted as saying in the LBT statement.
Searle said that ‘we are working with the family now to sort out the next steps of taking Jay home, recovery of his belongings and laying him to rest’.
After Slater’s disappearance, Tenerife police used helicopters, drones and search dogs to find him — but called off the search on 30 June. ALSO READ: Search for missing teenager Jay Slater in Tenerife ‘called off’ by police.
On Monday, the local mountain rescue service of the Guardia Civil police on the island of Tenerife issued a statement to say that a body had been found in the area near where Slater had gone missing last month – specifically ‘in the Masca area, in the municipality of Buenavista del Norte’.
‘The Guardia Civil mountain rescue and intervention unit has found, after 29 days of non-stop searching, the body of a young man in the Masca area,’ a statement said.
‘Given the difficulties of the case, the discovery has been possible thanks to the constant and discreet search carried out by the Guardia Civil for the last 29 days during which care was taken to ensure curious onlookers did not fill the area,’ it continued.
‘All the evidence suggests, with full identification still pending, that this is the young British man who disappeared on 17 June. Initial evidence shows he could have suffered an accident/fall in the inaccessible zone where he was found,’ the statement concluded.
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