The last man to see Jay Slater alive has married a single mother who faces prison for helping to smuggle £13 million worth of cannabis into the UK.
Ayub Qassim, 33, tied the knot with Paige Crisp, 24, in a traditional Islamic wedding last year. The ceremony is said to have taken place in Thailand, the same country Crisp and her gang smuggled drugs from.
Wedding and social media posts
In a series of recent loved-up photos posted on social media, Crisp can be seen with Qassim, who himself was jailed 11 years ago for masterminding a sophisticated operation to flood Wales with Class A drugs.
In one clip, he posts: "I never knew how powerful love was until it came to me, in the form of you". In another, Crisp appears to be dressed for a wedding, with henna tattoos on the back of her hands.
And a video on YouTube shows her in the same get-up while Qassim, who is of Somali heritage, is wearing a traditional white robe, the Daily Mail reports.
Crisp's conviction
Crisp, a cleaner from Malvern, Worcestershire, and mother of a four-year-old child, faces jail after being convicted of attempting to carry, remove, deposit, harbour, keep, conceal and deal with Class B drugs with intent to evade prohibition on importing.
She was convicted last week alongside 10 others who were stopped by border force with a 460kg haul of drugs in their luggage after paying extra baggage charges to smuggle the 22 suitcases into the UK. She is due to be sentenced in October.
Birmingham Crown Court heard the gang she was part of had travelled from Thailand to the UK via Charles De Gaulle Airport in France. Suspicions were raised when four of the smugglers arrived at Birmingham Airport from Paris with the large suitcases.
The bags contained a thin layer of clothing on top of vacuum-packed cannabis. They also had eight Apple AirTag trackers – all connected to the same Apple ID account.
Jay Slater's disappearance
Qassim, the former ringleader of a London-based crime gang who imported heroin and crack cocaine to Cardiff, hit the headlines when it emerged bricklayer Jay had vanished after leaving his Airbnb following a rave in Tenerife in June 2024.
He and pal Steven Roccas had given Jay a lift back to their gaff but the teen set off for a bus the next morning with little battery on his mobile phone. He was later found dead in a ravine after a month-long search which sparked a host of conspiracy theories.
An inquest into his death heard he was "off his head on drugs" at the three-day NRG festival. Pal Lucy Law phoned Jay at 8.30am when he vanished.
In a text, she told him to get back to where he came from "before it gets boiling". In the call she said she asked: "Where are you? He was just, 'I'm in the middle of the mountains'."
Reactions from family and neighbours
Crisp's mother, who lives in Upton-upon-Severn, told the Daily Mail: "The whole thing is very upsetting... What they are doing is wrong." But she declined to clarify who she was referring to, the paper reports.
A former neighbour of Crisp in Malvern recalled her with little affection. He told the Mail: "She was a horrible, horrible woman, really vile. She went abroad - to Thailand I think. We were very relieved when someone else moved in."
Another former neighbour said: "We understand she went to Thailand and got married to this Somalian man. Good riddance."
