• This is the journey of Alex Batty, who disappeared for six years: "They led a nomadic life, they fed on the garden"
  • France A 17-year-old British man who disappeared six years ago in Spain is found in France

Alex Batty, the young British man who disappeared in Malaga when he was 11 years old and was found six years later, at the age of 17, in France, near Toulouse, left for his country this afternoon. His plane took off at <> p.m., via Amsterdam, and will land in London, according to Toulouse prosecutor Antoine Leroy.

The young man thus ends his French journey: he was kidnapped by his mother and grandfather and has been touring the French Pyrenees since 2020, leading a nomadic life, without schooling and living in a kind of spiritual community. They moved, moving their own solace plates and feeding on the vegetable garden of the day. No mobile phone.

That way of life (which has allowed them to leave almost no trace of his identity) is what has prevented the authorities from finding him earlier, although the grandmother reported him missing in August 2017. She is the one who had custody of the young man, due to the mother's instability (the father had abandoned them).

She asked him for permission to take him to Malaga for fifteen days on holiday. That's where he lost track. His mother and grandfather took Alex away, spent two years living in Morocco, and then moved to France. In all those trips, even changing countries, no one noticed that Alex Batty was missing.

The boy was found early Wednesday morning. His mother wanted to go to Finland and the young man decided that he no longer wanted that itinerant life. This is what he himself told the gendarmes. He left the spiritual community they were in and has spent the last four days and nights walking in the mountains, until he was found in the early hours of the morning by a French student who makes a living distributing medicine in the area.

Alex is expected to arrive in London this afternoon, where he will be accompanied by members of the British police and then meet his grandmother. She has reduced mobility and could not travel to France to pick him up, Leroy said. France has already delegated Alex's story and it will be the British authorities who will be in charge of clarifying some points of the story, such as what happened to his mother, supposedly in Finland.

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  • United Kingdom