Alex Batty, a 17-year-old teenager, was found alive on Wednesday December 13 in France. Missing since 2017, he will be repatriated to England on Saturday December 16.
Alex Batty will return to England on Saturday December 16 at the end of the afternoon, the prosecutor announced, reports BFMTV. The 17-year-old teenager, found in Toulouse six years after his disappearance, will find his grandmother, his legal guardian, whom he has not seen since. Missing since September 2017, he was found in the southwest of France by a delivery driver who saw him on the side of a road in the middle of the night. He “will be accompanied by members of the British police services” during his journey from Toulouse to London, the magistrate said.
Custody of the young man had been entrusted to his grandmother before his mother kidnapped him during a vacation in Spain, reports franceinfo. For six years, he had lived a “nomadic” life within a “spiritual” community. When he was found, he had just escaped and had been walking along a road for four days. According to the magistrate, who gave a press conference Friday evening, he is in good health, appears to be of “lively intelligence” and does not appear to have suffered any abuse during the six years that his kidnapping lasted. The mother, still untraceable, could be in Finland.
A nomadic community, but not a sect
To investigators, Alex Batty confided that he had left to escape the “spiritual community” of his mother and grandfather, indicates Antoine Leroy. Since leaving the UK, “he has lived by transporting himself from house to house with solar panels, only traveling in carpools, always in places where there were families, with people who were never the same, feeding themselves thanks to the vegetable gardens”, explains the public prosecutor. A community based on questions around “work on the ego”, “reincarnation” but also on “the non-existence of the real world”. The prosecutor specifies that the community in which the young Englishman grew up is not clearly identified as a sect.
When traveling, Alex Batty, his mother and his grandfather who died a few months ago traveled with very few personal belongings. They were traveling with solar panels and “vegetable gardens” indicated the deputy public prosecutor of Toulouse. The teenager did not have a phone within the spiritual community and when he was found. This absence of technology could correspond to the philosophy of life, to the alternative way of life, applied by the spiritual community.
Was Alex Batty subjected to violence?
The teenager indicated “that he had suffered sexual assault when he was little”, but not during the six years of his kidnapping, according to the deputy public prosecutor. Alex Batty “does not describe any physical violence from anyone” during his life in the spiritual community. According to Antoine Leroy, the young man is “in good overall health” and is “intelligent although not educated for six years”.