He “walked and slept at night, feeding in the fields and gardens.” This is how Alex Batty, a young English victim of a family kidnapping in 2017, described to the gendarmes of the Villefranche-de-Lauragais (Haute-Garonne) research brigade the four days of wandering that took him returned to civilization during the night from Wednesday to Thursday.
An itinerant lifestyle to which he was apparently accustomed, according to the first, succinct statements he made on the way he has lived since 2017 and that day when his mother and his maternal grandfather , who did not have his custody, decided not to bring him back to Manchester, after a holiday in Andalusia.
Vegetable gardens and solar panels for only luggage
At the time, Alex’s grandmother and guardian, Susan Caruana, suspected her ex-husband and daughter of having drawn him into an “alternative sectarian movement.” The teenager, now 17 years old, “does not use the term sect. He talks about spiritual community,” Antoine Leroy, the deputy prosecutor of Toulouse, said this Friday.
The teenager – who “it is not certain that he realized that he was wanted”, first lived “a little more than two years in Morocco” after his disappearance. He arrived in 2020-21 “in the Pyrenees” as he says, where the trio joined a group made up of other families, changing in its composition, and evolving in a vast area going from the surroundings of Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales) to Aude, via Ariège. “They often moved from large houses to large houses, always by carpool,” said the magistrate. “The only luggage they carried was their solar panels and their vegetable gardens,” added Léa Chambonnière, the commander of the Villefranche-de-Lauragais company.
Meditation and reincarnation
On a daily basis, the community lived on minor repair or restoration work. Well versed in “energies”, she meditated, carried out “work on the ego, on reincarnation”, based on “the non-existence of the real world”. Alex, who therefore never went to school, insisted on the fact that he had “absolutely never” suffered physical violence during the Pyrenean interlude, but he spoke of “sexual violence” in his English childhood. , before the kidnapping.
His “escape” from the community last weekend is believed to be linked to his mother’s decision to move to Finland. What she would have done last week according to the police. Without Alex, determined to take charge of his life and find his grandmother in England. According to him, his grandfather died in the community “about six months ago”.
If “no investigation is opened, neither in France nor in Spain into his kidnapping”, on which the investigations belong exclusively to the Manchester police, Antoine Leroy specifies that, on the French side, “the gendarmes will launch investigations” into this “spiritual community”, “perhaps sectarian”, where Spaniards, Quebecers, Indians meet, and which has no a priori never talked about her.
As for Alex, found exhausted and without identity papers, he should return to Manchester and the arms of his grandmother within “one or two days”, time to complete the administrative formalities; As long as he is in Toulouse, the authorities are determined “to protect his privacy”. Across the Channel, James Cameron, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, also called on the press to preserve this boy with an incredible destiny, at least for the time of the reunion.