The teenager Alex Batty, rescued on Thursday in France after missing for six years, in what is described as a kidnapping of his mother, returned to England on Saturday, on a flight from Toulouse to Manchester with a stopover in Amsterdam. He was accompanied by a relative who traveled to the French city and by two British police officers.
According to some passengers who shared the flight, Batty was wearing a hooded jacket and was escorted off the plane, while the rest of the travelers remained seated for about 20 minutes. Manchester Police have warned that Batty, 17, is a person with an identity protected by Justice, and that it is a crime to obtain or publish images of him.
The police force in the Greater Manchester region, where his grandmother resides, said on Saturday night that it had not obtained any formal statement from Alex and could therefore not offer information about the circumstances of his departure from England, the September 30, 2017, and the period that elapsed until its rescue, last Thursday.
Deputy Police Chief Matt Boyle stated that “talking to him at a pace he is comfortable with will determine how this case progresses and whether he will have to continue with a criminal investigation.” “Our focus is on supporting Alex and his family, alongside other local services to ensure they are well and that their reintegration into society is as smooth as possible.”
The Toulouse magistracy already offered on Friday some information that it would have obtained from conversations with the young man. The account offered to the media in the Haute Garonne department states that he would have spent most of the last six years in Morocco and in different regions of southeastern France in the last two years. He apparently rejects the idea of having been kidnapped. According to the first investigations, the young man would have chosen to lead the alternative type of life of his mother until he possibly decided to take his own course this week. “My mother is a little crazy,” he confessed to the driver who picked him up.
A rebellious young woman
Official information is combined with journalistic investigations. While some claim that the grandfather died six months ago, British media have spoken with residents of Quillan (where the “spiritual commune” in which father, daughter and grandson would have settled recently) and affirm that the grandfather is alive, although They call him Peter and not by his real name, David.
Fabien Accidini, the French chiropractic student who invited him to get into his van when he saw him walking along the edge of a road in the rain at three in the morning, told 'The Times' that the boy insisted on helping him. to unload the boxes of medicines that it distributes to the pharmacies in that Pyrenean region.
It was the final stretch of a journey with his mother and grandfather, in search of a life understood as natural. The young man would have spent his last years in an old farm building in Gite de la Bastide, near Quillan and about 25 kilometers from where he was found. During the four days before being rescued he walked at night and slept during the day, feeding on what he found in fields and gardens.
The grandmother, Susan, has spoken harshly about her daughter, Melanie, in 'The Sun' newspaper. She claims that she was a rebellious young woman who gave them a lot of trouble. She followed her father when, plagued by mortgage debt, he decided to have a spiritual life away from the routines of work. His ex-wife says she changed her personality after undergoing therapy for health problems. Melanie had lost parental responsibility for her son before taking him after a holiday in Malaga.
Fabien Accidini described Alex as a blonde boy, quite tall, wearing a white sweatshirt and black jeans. When we picked him up on the road, he was carrying a flashlight, a skateboard under his arm and a backpack on his back. The teenager told her his name was Zak, but then told her the real story about him. He had already been walking through the mountains for four days. He narrated how his mother had “kidnapped” him, although he later appears to have retracted these statements. Accidini, intrigued by the story, looked up his name on the Internet and realized who he really was. Alex had a hundred euros in his pocket, but he didn't have a phone. He used Accidini's cell phone to contact his grandmother, and his first words after six years were: “Hello grandmother, it's me, Alex. I am in Toulouse, France. I really hope you get this message. “I love you and I want to come home.”
The British minor has led a nomadic life with his mother and maternal grandfather through different countries within “a spiritual community,” as Antoine Leroy, deputy public prosecutor in Toulouse, explained on Friday. He disappeared during a family vacation in Malaga in 2011. Alex would have made, as he explained to the authorities through an interpreter, the decision to leave the community where he lived with his mother in the Pyrenees after she announced that He intended to go live in Finland. Apparently, the teenager did not want to continue with that nomadic life and chose to go look for his grandmother, his legal guardian, in the United Kingdom.
The French Police continue this weekend reconstructing Alex's journey through the Pyrenees in search of the supposed commune where he lived with his mother, whose whereabouts are unknown. Investigators believe that the woman could now be in Finland, according to 'Le Monde'.
The area that focuses the searches is frequented by people who intend to lead an alternative life or one attached to nature, although the most common thing consists of the establishment of families and not complete communities, who go down to the town markets to get supplies or grow crops. their own gardens. Neighbors know them as people “off the grid”, that is, outside the system, with whom coexistence is usually good. The agents have delimited an area between the road where Alex was found and Quillan, in Aude, where the boy tried to enroll in a school last November. He did not get it because he lacked the necessary documentation.
Apparently, Melanie is, or has been, a fan of conspiracy theories. She, along with her father, would have met other people on Facebook who introduced them to groups against evictions or “mortgage challengers”; opponents of paying mortgages, taxes or bills. According to 'The Times', flat earthers were also mixed in her circle and through the networks they came into contact with a man who in 2014 invited them to travel to Morocco to see a supposed quantum generator capable of generating unlimited free energy.
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