The young man, now aged 17, is said to have left a “spiritual community” with which he had lived for six years. He expressed his desire to return to his country in a message sent to his grandmother.
A reunion, six years later. Alex Batty, a young Englishman missing since September 2017, was found overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday on a mountainous road in Aude by a student who delivers medicine to pharmacies. After checks, the 17-year-old teenager was indeed the missing child while he was supposed to spend vacation in Marbella, in the south of Spain, with his mother and grandfather.
Speaking to BFMTV, Fabien Accidini, the student who picked up Alex Batty in his vehicle, explains that the young man borrowed his phone in order to warn his grandmother and guardian, Susan Caruana, now 68 years old, who all these years fought to find his grandson.
“Hello Grandma, it’s me Alex, I’m in France in Toulouse, I hope you will receive this message, I love you, I want to come home,” he wrote, via Facebook messaging.
Contacted by the BFMTV antenna, Kent Lawlor, journalist for The Oldham Times who was able to speak with the grandmother, reports the latter’s joy. “She was so happy when she was able to talk to her grandson. The last time she saw it was a boy, on the phone she spoke with a man,” he said.
Nearby SunSusan Caruana also said “not knowing where her mother is.”
“A little crazy” mother
Also on Wednesday, Alex Batty was taken care of by the gendarmes of the Revel brigade. Before that, he was able to tell Fabien Accidini about his incredible journey during these six years of disappearance.
“He said that his mother had kidnapped him when he was 12,” he confides. “Since then, he had lived in Spain in a luxury house with around ten people. He would have arrived in France around 2021.”
In 2018, Alex Batty’s grandmother had reported to the BBC that she suspected the child’s mother and grandfather of having taken him to live in a “spiritual community” in Morocco. According to her, at that time they were looking for an alternative lifestyle and did not want Alex to go to school.
It would only be this weekend that Alex Batty would have left the community in the mountains between Ariège and Aude to join his family in England. He then spent four days wandering the roads.
According to the Briton, he was free to leave this “spiritual, far from classical life” community in which his “slightly crazy” mother lives. He should be interviewed by British investigators when he arrives across the Channel.