Back in the United Kingdom, Alex Batty comes out of silence. The 17-year-old teenager found in France last week, six years after his disappearance, explained that he wanted to return to the United Kingdom to ensure ” his future ” and admitted to having invented part of his story, in a interview published Friday by the tabloid The Sun.
“I started thinking about leaving when I was 14 or 15”explained the young man, adding: “I understood that this was not a very good lifestyle for my future”. He says he wants to become a computer engineer.
Alex Batty disappeared in 2017, while on vacation in Spain with his mother – who did not have custody of him – and his grandfather. He was found last Wednesday, in the middle of the night, by a delivery driver while he was walking along a road near Toulouse. He returned on December 16 to Oldham, in the Manchester region (North), after having led a nomadic life for six years with his mother and grandfather, who had kidnapped him.
“No friends, no social life. Work, work, work, but no studies. This is the life I imagined I would live if I stayed with mom”he says, before adding: “It would always be the same, whether in France or Spain, in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere, no one my age”. “So when I turned 16, I talked to grandpa about going back to Englandhe explained. My mother was against the idea. She was very anti-government, anti-vax”. “She wasn’t really open to any other opinions”he argued.
“I lied to try to [les] protect “
He says he left around midnight on December 11, after an argument with his mother, with a backpack filled with four t-shirts, three pairs of pants, a skateboard, a flashlight, 100 euros and a Swiss army knife, with the The idea of reaching the nearest city, Toulouse, 110 kilometers north of where he was then.
The teenager, however, admits in this interview to having invented the story which he told to French investigators according to which he had walked four days through the mountains to cover his tracks, for fear that his mother and his grandfather would be arrested for child abduction. “I lied to try to protect my mother and grandfather, but I realize they’re probably going to get caught anyway”did he declare.
“I slept outside, on the ground, it was freezing”he still tells the Sun, declaring to have covered around thirty kilometers in two days.
He describes his mother, for whom he left a note before his departure, as “a good person, but not a good mother”. As for his return to Manchester, “it was raining, as usual”he laughs, recounting his moving reunion with his grandmother, who had his custody before he was kidnapped.
The judicial investigation opened in this case is in the hands of British justice.