While her grandson, Alex Batty was found this week in Aude, his grandmother and legal guardian expressed her relief after fighting since his disappearance.
After six years of anguish, relief. Alex Batty, a British child who disappeared in 2017 in Spain, was found on Wednesday December 13 in the southwest of France, near Toulouse. Alex Batty was 11 years old when he flew on September 30, 2017 for a vacation to Marbella, Spain, with his mother, Melanie, then 37 years old, and his grandfather, 58 years old. Originally from Oldham, a suburb of Manchester in England, the boy disappeared on October 8, 2017, when he was supposed to return to his grandmother and legal guardian, Susan Caruana. She had allowed the boy she had looked after for three years to go on vacation with his mother and grandfather because “she could not take him abroad herself due to health problems”, according to The Guardian .
The investigation launched by the Manchester police, in collaboration with the Spanish police, failed to find any trace of the child. Very quickly, Susan Caruana suspected the child’s mother and his grandfather of having taken him to live in a “spiritual community” in Morocco. Questioned by the BBC in 2019, Susan Caruana explained that her daughter had already taken Alex to a community in the past, in search of an “alternative way of life”. It was in Morocco in 2014. Still according to the grandmother, her daughter and her ex-husband shared “a different belief system”: “They didn’t want him to go to school, they don’t believe in regular school.
After fighting for years to find him, Susan Caruana expressed her joy upon learning this “excellent news” from the British tabloid The Sun. “I’m so happy. I spoke to him and he’s fine,” she said. “He is currently with the authorities in France. It’s such a shock.” According to the Toulouse public prosecutor’s office, the child’s family confirmed that it was indeed him and that he should soon return to the Manchester region in England. “We are waiting for the grandmother to come and get him. We are waiting to set up repatriation with the British,” declared the public prosecutor in Toulouse Samuel Vuelta-Simon.