Title: Missing UK teen found in France after six years
(Image source: France Télévisions)
Six years after he disappeared with his mother and grandfather, Alex Batty was finally found by a student working as a delivery driver in the foothills of the Pyrenees in south-western France.
Fabien Accidini has described how he came across Alex Batty on a mountain road in the early hours of the morning. It was the middle of the night and he was taking medicines to local pharmacies near the village of Chalabre. While driving, he noticed a young man walking on the side of an unlit, mountain road at about 03:00 on Wednesday.
The Toulouse student, Fabien Accidini, did not know it yet, but he had stumbled on a 17-year-old who had decided to abandon his mother’s life in an itinerant, spiritual commune in search of his grandmother in England. He had already been walking in the Pyrenees for four days.
Alex Batty’s mother and grandfather had travelled from Greater Manchester for a week-long holiday in Marbella in September 2017. According to the student, the teenager had spent time living with 10 other people in a luxurious house in Spain before heading to France four years later.
Alex, who had no phone, used the driver’s Facebook account to get in touch with his grandmother, Susan Caruana, who is also his legal guardian, and told her that he was in France and wanted to come home.
The student told French TV that Alex Batty felt relieved to have left the travelling commune, expressing that he didn’t want to spend his whole life in that commune.
It is believed that the boy had escaped, but he had no sense that he had been locked up in any way and was free to leave. UK detectives are keen to track down his mother and grandfather. Alex Batty appeared to be keen to be taken to an embassy in a big French city, but the student decided to contact the gendarmerie, the French military police.
He drove to Revel, just outside Carcassonne, and left him with the local gendarmes who checked his identity and he is now in Toulouse in the hands of French authorities.