Jay Slater’s family have moved their search efforts to a new area where he was reportedly seen on CCTV nine hours before he went missing after the Tenerife police abandoned their search.

The Civil Guard called off their search for the 19-year-old, who had now been missing for three weeks after it found no evidence of where he could be, prompting his family and members of the public to take matters into their own hands.

On Monday, Jay’s father Warren and brother Zak relocated their search to the mountainous village of Santiago del Teide – which was previously the location of a potential, although unconfirmed, sighting of the teenager.

His family released CCTV footage last month of what people thought could be him after witnesses claimed to have seen him sitting on a bench outside a church with two men, 3.5 miles from his last known location.

It has not been confirmed whether the figure in the CCTV footage was Jay, but his parents have continued to scour the area and implored British police to help.

Warren told The Sun: “As a family, we need to ask the British authorities to help. He’s a British citizen. Get Interpol involved. At the moment, it’s just us.

“I haven’t got a team. We need a team to come over here and find out for us what the police are doing and what we need to do. Our hands are tied over here – we need experts. It’ll take an army 10 years to cover all this.”

He also called on British police to interview Ayub Qassin, also known as Johnny Vegas – a convicted drug dealer and one of the last people to see Jay before he disappeared.

Qassim, however, insisted that “Jay came to the house alive, and he left the house alive” and he has “nothing to hide” after the two stayed at the same Airbnb the night before Jay went missing.

He was interviewed by Spanish police along with the other unnamed man at the Airbnb, but officials deemed them both “irrelevant” to the investigation and let them fly back to the UK the next day.

Jay’s mum Debbie Duncan has also been left heartbroken by the disappearance of her son, fearing that “something untoward” has happened to him.

On June 22, she told reporters that a witness had come forward claiming to have seen Jay in Santiago del Teide on June 17 – the day he disappeared. Despite the ongoing search of the area, the teenager from Lancashire remains missing.