She claims the apprentice bricklayer’s pals and family are doing more to find him.
The force has yet to make any official comment about the claims from Lancashire Police. And the Civil Guard insisted today it had no intention of doing so at this stage.
A well-placed source said: “The Civil Guard is not going to reply to criticism or praise it receives here.
“The force is aware of some of the comments that are already out there but are prioritising what needs to be done which is to search for Jay. Just imagine how much chatter there’d be if we did publicly respond.”
“We have a different way of doing things and that’s not to say it’s better or worse. Just different.”
There has not yet been any police response, official or otherwise, to reports of a possible sighting of Jay outside a church in Santiago de Teide around 6pm last Monday.
Jay’s mum Debbie Duncan said a witness had gone to police and claimed to have seen him sitting on a bench with a pair of men, just over three miles away from the village of Masca where the missing teenager had spent time in an Airbnb with two men he had met at the three-day rave he flew to Tenerife to attend before he vanished.
They said: “The same Civil Guard units that have been searching for him since last Monday, including the mountain rescue experts and officers with sniffer dogs, are out on the ground, along with a police helicopter in the air. Firefighters and Civil Protection workers with drones are also involved.
“No hypothesis is being ruled out. Some of the areas that are being searched have been looked at before.”
A Civil Guard source said: “Officers involved in the search are still hopeful Jay can be found alive and reunited with his loved ones but they’re also acutely aware time is of the essence here.”
Although an off-road path through the Masga Gorge ends up on a beach, the police search so far has been a land and air search.
A Civil Guard helicopter has flown over the sea, but experts are not thought to have studied local currents so far and seriously looked at the possibility of a search with divers in targeted areas.
“The teams are looking for anything that might signal Jay’s presence in a given area, right down to parts of his clothing that could have snagged on plants. We understand it’s frustrating for his family that officers have not found anything so far of significance but experience tells us anything could happen at any time.
“We’re talking about a very steep area with lots of places where someone could fall and lots of cliffs but no-one’s given up hope yet of finding Jay alive and no-one’s talking at the moment about an end date for the search that’s going on.”