Alex Batty disappeared in 2017, at the age of 11. This young Briton, who is now 17 years old, was found this week near Toulouse. He will be repatriated this weekend to the United Kingdom and his maternal grandmother will have custody of him, the deputy public prosecutor of Toulouse announced on Friday, December 15. He will leave France from Toulouse or Bordeaux, where the British consulate is located, magistrate Antoine Leroy explained at a press conference.
Two gendarmes who collected the teenager’s first statements were present at the press conference. Mr. Leroy described the “journey” of Alex Batty, his mother, Melanie Batty, and his grandfather David Batty, passing through Spain then Morocco, before reaching the French Pyrenees where, according to investigators , they would have stayed in the Pyrénées-Orientales, Aude and Ariège.
A nomadic life in a “spiritual” community
For six years, including two in France, he lived a “nomadic” life within a “spiritual” community, never staying more than a few months in the same place, described the deputy prosecutor. If the young man did not mention any physical violence to investigators during the six years that his kidnapping lasted, he did, however, “indicate having suffered sexual assault when he was little”, at the age of “5 or 6 years (…) within his family, without saying more,” noted Mr. Leroy.
Alex Batty, described by the deputy prosecutor as being of “lively intelligence, very calm”, would have decided to escape after her mother announced her intention to go to Finland, where she is “probably now”, without the grandfather, who would have died six months ago.
The teenager, who only speaks English, walked for four nights in the direction of Toulouse, before being discovered at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, according to the magistrate, by a young delivery man who took him to the gendarmerie from Saint-Félix-Lauragais, from where he was entrusted to the research brigade in Villefranche-de-Lauragais.
Reconstruct your journey
If the only judicial investigation opened in this case is in the hands of British justice, French justice will now “try to reconstruct the journey of this young person in France”, concluded the deputy prosecutor.
Currently, the young man “is sheltered, social services have taken care of him,” the Toulouse prosecutor said earlier in the day, without giving the exact location where he was. “We are in contact, of course, with the British police (…). We are in close contact with them to organize this repatriation, he continued, specifying: “Recognition is well established, there is no problem. »
“I’m very happy,” Susan Caruana, the teenager’s grandmother, told British newspaper The Sun on Thursday. “I spoke to him this afternoon and there’s no doubt it’s him. When he was with us, I was talking to a child, now I’m talking to a man,” she also told the Times. “It’s so incredible not to know if someone is dead or alive,” Ms. Caruana told the British daily.
