He walked at night and slept during the day, to be seen as little as possible. She fed on what she found in fields and gardens. She had about 100 euros on her. She didn't have a phone. Through roads and paths of the French Pyrenees, she tried to reach the city of Toulouse. From there she imagined that she could return to her country, after so many years.
Alex Batty, a 17-year-old British teenager, wanted to escape the life he had led since he was 11. A nomadic life that took him, along with his mother and grandfather, from Spain to Morocco and from there to the south of France through communities spiritual centers generally installed in rural areas. When his mother announced that he wanted to move to Finland, the boy said enough. And he left.
He had lived all this time with his mother and grandfather, until he died six months ago. The problem was that neither her mother nor her grandfather were her legal guardians. Custody corresponded to her grandmother, Susan Caruana, a resident of Oldham, near Manchester, in England.
In 2017, Caruana agreed for her grandson to spend 15 days on vacation with her ex-husband and daughter in Malaga. The boy did not appear again. Until Wednesday.
In the early morning of October 13, 2023, a student named Fabien Accidini, who earned money by distributing medicines to pharmacies in the towns on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees in a van, saw a boy alone on the road. Black jeans, white sweater, a backpack. It was pouring rain. He saw it for the first time, around two o'clock. He passed by. The second time, at three in the morning, he thought something was wrong and offered to get into the vehicle.
It was Alex Batty. The one who disappeared from Malaga six years ago. The boy that the British authorities had been searching for for years without any success.
Accidini lent Batty the phone so he could write a message to Grandma. She gave him water. “She had been walking in the mountains for more than four days!” Accidini explained to the newspaper. The Dépêche du Midi.
Accidini's story to the regional newspaper and the press conference this Friday by the French prosecutor's office allow us to reconstruct the escape, and partially the years in which Batty was missing. Both are based on the statements of the teenager, who on Saturday, or Sunday at the latest, plans to return to Manchester and reunite with his grandmother and legal guardian. She declared: “I am so happy…”.
The deputy public prosecutor of the French Republic in Toulouse, Antoine Leroy, explained to journalists that Alex Batty was born in 2006 in Oldham. His parents were lawyers. His father left the family home when the boy was two years old. His grandmother and mother raised him.
It was not a well-established family. The mother had already taken the son to Morocco once, in 2014. The grandmother later obtained custody of her, as she considered that her daughter was unstable.
Everything was cut short during the holidays of 2017. The grandmother authorized the child to go on vacation to Spain for a few days. But he didn't come back. The mother, the grandfather and he sent him a message. “Alex said that he liked being with his mother and grandfather a million times more,” the grandmother would later lament. “Obviously, he hurt me, but I quickly had other concerns.” The British authorities launched a search notice.
What happened at that time is not clear, but Alex Batty's statement to the gendarmerie and his conversation with the student who picked him up in his truck give an idea. He lived, with his mother and his grandfather, for two years in Morocco. They were not always in the same place, but rather they changed.
In 2020 or 2021, they left Morocco and, after a few days in Spain, they moved to the Pyrenees. They passed through the departments or provinces of Pyrénées-Orientales, Aude and Arriège: the area from Perpignan to the south of Toulouse, a picturesque area with some isolated corners, where it has been common for urbanites and neo-rurals to settle for decades. The boy, now a teenager, is unable to pinpoint the exact place. In these years he did not learn French.
In any case, they moved incessantly. Prosecutor Leroy said that they carried solar panels and thus went from house to house, where they lived with groups of a dozen people of various nationalities. Among them Spaniards, Canadians and Indians. They weren't always the same.
Alex Batty said in his statement that the mother and grandfather had “an obsession with energy and solar panels,” the prosecutor said. And he explained that in the communities where they settled “they did work on the ego, meditation, the nonexistence of the real world and reincarnation.” He never felt “locked in or kidnapped” nor suffered physical violence. He did say that he had been a victim of sexual assault in his family, but before leaving England, when he was five or six years old.
The prosecutor said that “there will be investigations into the places where he could have resided in this context, which looks very similar to a sectarian context.” But he added: “There is no identified sect as such.” The teenager speaks of “spiritual community.”
There are still many open questions and shadow areas over these years. One is whether the mother belonged to a cult. The other, her whereabouts. And yes, indeed, she is now in Finland.
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