It’s almost a Christmas miracle. Missing for six years, Alex Batty, the British teenager, was found this week in France. He must be repatriated to the United Kingdom on Saturday “late afternoon,” said Toulouse deputy prosecutor Antoine Leroy. The 17-year-old young man will take off from Toulouse for London and “will be accompanied by members of the British police,” said the magistrate.
He will then be returned to his maternal grandmother, to whom British justice had entrusted his custody before his mother kidnapped him in 2017 during a vacation in Spain. Alex Batty, who had led a “nomadic” life within a “spiritual” community for six years, was found in the middle of the night by a delivery driver while he was walking along a road, the prosecutor said. deputy during a press conference Friday.
He is in good health, “very calm”, seems to have a “lively intelligence” according to the doctor who examined him, and does not appear to have suffered any abuse during the six years of his kidnapping. The mother, untraceable to date, could currently be in Finland, Antoine Leroy then indicated.
A nomadic childhood
“I can barely describe how relieved and happy I am that Alex was found safe and sound,” said his grandmother Susan Caruana, quoted Friday evening in a British police statement. The one who is now a young man was only 11 years old when he disappeared in the summer of 2017. His mother Melanie Batty, deprived of custody of her child because she was considered “unstable”, had obtained authorization from the take on vacation to Spain for 15 days.
But when this deadline expired, Alex Batty did not return to his grandmother, who lives near Manchester, in the northwest of England. A search notice was then launched, on August 10, 2017, to find the child, his mother and his grandfather, David Batty, divorced from Susan Caruana. For six years, the fugitives led a nomadic life, never staying more than a few months in the same place, first in Morocco then in the French Pyrenees.
The separation from the mother then the discovery
Alex Batty, who does not suffer physical violence according to his hearing by the gendarmes, must live according to spiritual precepts, such as “work on the ego, meditation, reincarnation”, explained Friday Antoine Leroy. But when his mother tells him that she wants to continue their “journey” in Finland, the young man decides to leave and takes the road towards Toulouse, along the RN7.
He then walks at night, sleeping during the day, for four days, apparently so as not to meet anyone, and feeds on food gleaned from “gardens and fields”, according to the deputy prosecutor. It was there that a delivery driver found him around 3 a.m. according to the magistrate, walking in the pouring rain, and entrusted him to the gendarmes after Alex Batty told him his story and revealed his identity.