"I want a normal life, I want a normal future," Alex Batty explained to the delivery driver and chiropractic student who found him on a road near Toulouse, in the middle of the rain, after leaving the "spiritual community" in which he lived. with his mother. According to the police, he had been missing for six years.
His mother – whom he has described as “a bit strange” – and his maternal grandfather took him on holiday to Malaga in 2017, and never returned to Oldham, a town in the Greater Manchester metropolitan area. It was as if the earth had swallowed them. The grandmother, who has legal custody of the boy, has explained that her daughter and her ex-husband were looking for an “alternative lifestyle,” “did not believe in the system,” and did not want to give Alex a formal education.
Now, the French prosecutor's office has indicated in a press conference that the mother could be in Finland, although it points out that the British authorities have more information on the matter. According to the statements of the French authorities, the young man would not have suffered harm from his mother or his grandfather, but they do affirm that the minor claims to have suffered sexual assaults at the age of five or six. Furthermore, he should be able to return to his family in the UK on Saturday or Sunday at the latest.
When he disappeared, he was an eleven-year-old boy and now he is a seventeen-year-old teenager. He claims that he was not a prisoner and was free to leave whenever he wanted, and that is precisely what he has done, because he missed his friends and family from the north of England. In Spain he lived in a “luxurious house with about ten other people,” and in France in a traveling “spiritual community.” Despite this, he does not speak Spanish or French, and has not gone to school. He did not have a cell phone, and used the Facebook of the driver who stopped him to initially communicate with his grandmother.
When his hitchhiking request was answered by Fabien Accidini at two in the morning near Chalabre, the boy explained his story and said he wanted to go to a “big city” and “go to an embassy.” He seemed to have a very limited knowledge of the world and how society works. The chiropractic student explained that the best thing to do was to go to a police station. When he arrived he was so tired that he lay down on the floor to sleep. The only thing he had on him was a surfboard and a flashlight.
After confirming his identity through photographs that have circulated on the Internet, the French authorities called his grandmother, who has remarried and changed her last name, and both were able to have an extensive and emotional telephone conversation. The plan is that "in the next few days" he returns to what was his home, while the police search for his mother and grandfather, who are no longer in the "spiritual community" and are missing (their father and mother). paternal family nothing is known).
“I remembered a child and now I have met a man,” says the grandmother, who has described the situation as terrifying and on whom the burden of giving Alex the “normal” life and future that he longs for will initially fall. . “The worst thing of all was not knowing for sure if he was dead or alive,” she says, although she suspected that her ex-husband and daughter had taken him with them for the “alternative life” experience, far from the usual rules of coexistence. of society, which they desired. The fact that she had legal custody of the boy already suggests that this was no ordinary family.
There are still ends to be tied up, but Alex doesn't want to know more about gurus and communes. He longs for normality.
