The boy’s mother, Melanie Batty, may be staying in Finland.
Elsa Osipova,
Elise Aaltonen
The French police have shared new information about the British boy who disappeared six years ago, says Sky News.
Reported missing in 2017 Alex Batty was found yesterday in the south of France.
According to the French authorities, the 17-year-old told that he ran away from his mother, who tried to get Batty to come with her to Finland. According to Reuters, Toulouse’s assistant prosecutor Antoine Leroy said that the boy’s mother Melanie Batty may reside in Finland.
Batty walked for four nights in the French Pyrenees, the police said at a press conference.
Batty, from Oldham, UK, disappeared in 2017 while on a trip to Malaga with his mother and grandfather. The boy was 11 years old at the time of his disappearance.
French magazine La Depeche du Midi says that Batty recently lived in a spiritual community in Ariege in the Pyrenees.
The boy was found on Wednesday, when the police received a report of a suspicious youth walking along the roadside. The report to the authorities was made by a motorist who drove past the boy, who had asked him to borrow a phone in order to tell his grandmother that he was okay.
The grandmother, who was named the boy’s official guardian, said in 2018 In an interview with the BBC suspecting that the boy’s mother kidnapped the child and took him to a sect in Morocco. According to the BBC, Batty is in good health. He had also told the French police that he had spent a couple of years in France and that he had not been treated badly in any way.
Updated at 6:57 p.m. with information from Toulouse’s assistant prosecutor that Batty may be staying in Finland.