The odyssey experienced by Alex Batty, the young man found in France after his disappearance in Malaga six years ago, is worthy of a film production. He was located by a delivery driver in a French town hitchhiking and after telling him the story of how he had ended up there, the worker contacted the authorities to help him return home to his grandmother.
Little by little, details of what his life has been like during these years in which track of him was lost are revealed. After those vacations in Spain, his mother and grandfather took him to live in a nomadic community. They moved from one territory to another from time to time and in this last period, which seems to have lasted a couple of years, according to the Daily Mail, he was based in a village in the Pyrenees, just an hour from the city of Carcassonne.
When his mother told him that they would soon move to Finland, the young man understood that he did not want to continue taking that path, and decided to go on his own to locate his grandmother and return home with her. Rumors about his way of life until now suggest that the young man lived with his grandfather and his mother on a farm high in the Pyrenees. Specifically, in the village of La Bastide, where they were hired to make arrangements in exchange for housing and food.
The mayor of the place declared to the aforementioned British media that Barry was “a charming young man, always polite and kind. He didn't speak French, neither of them did, but they always said 'Bonjour'. We knew the boy as Zak and his grandfather as Peter, and only after reading about them in the newspaper did I learn the truth. And he confirmed that he had last seen the young man carrying a suitcase.
According to the young man's statements to the authorities, his maternal grandfather had died six months ago and the community organized a joint meditation after the event. The grandmother, who had custody of the minor, had always defended that her daughter, Melanie, had ended up with her grandson in a sect. Melanie had been leading a more bohemian and spiritual lifestyle for years. A philosophy that was also soon adopted by the boy's grandfather who, after receiving medication to treat his health problems, “changed radically,” the grandmother highlighted in an interview years ago.
“They didn't want me to go to school”
Melanie proposed to her mother that she take Alex on vacation to Spain, to Marbella. Something that did not convince the grandmother, but that she ended up accepting. During the holidays, Alex called me and told me that he was at the beach. But in the background I heard her mother shout: 'Turn off the phone. Contact is over.” She made my heart skip a beat. “She was desperate,” she explained. After this, a video message arrived in which Melanie warned him that Alex was not coming back and that she wanted him to share her way of life.
From Spain it seems that they moved to Morocco and the last location the family had was in the Pyrenees. Investigators are considering the possibility that Alex's mother is already in Finland, following the plan that she had proposed to her son.
Everything indicates that Alex has grown up in a community without much contact with people outside his 'family'. «They didn't want him to go to school. “They don't believe in conventional school,” the grandmother told The Times newspaper. The young man contacted her through a message on social networks and it is expected that the meeting between the two will take place over the next few days.
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