“We are waiting for the grandmother to come and get him. We are waiting to set up repatriation with the British,” the public prosecutor in Toulouse, Samuel Vuelta-Simon, told AFP on Friday about this teenager. , Alex Batty, disappeared in 2017 and found this week near Toulouse.
“Our priority is to bring him back to the United Kingdom,” said the police in Greater Manchester, in the northwest of England, where the young man is from. Alex Batty is “expected” in “the coming days”, added his deputy chief commissioner, Chris Sykes, at a press conference on Friday. Currently, the young man “is sheltered, social services have taken care of him”, said the Toulouse prosecutor, without specifying the exact location where the young man was.
Happy grandmother
“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, it is not no problem”. The investigation is in the hands of the British police, according to a source close to the matter.
“I am very happy,” the grandmother, who has custody of the teenager, told the British newspaper The Sun THURSDAY. “I spoke to him this afternoon and there is no doubt that it is him. When he was with us, I was talking to a child, now I am talking to a man,” she also said. affirmed in Times. “It’s so incredible not to know if someone is dead or alive,” Susan Caruana added to this British daily.
The healthy young man
According to the BBC, citing a police source, the young man, who is in good health, claimed not to have suffered ill-treatment. Then aged 11, he disappeared abroad while on vacation with his mother and grandfather. “The mother and grandfather, who do not have custody of Alex, have not been found, but they are still wanted in connection with this disappearance,” according to the BBC.
Found wandering on the roads
His grandmother said in 2018 that she believed Alex’s mother and grandfather, from whom she is divorced, had taken him to live in a “spiritual community” in Morocco. The newspaper La Dépêche du Midi claims for its part that Alex Batty was “picked up by a delivery driver while he was wandering on the roads”, a version corroborated by a source close to the case. “His mother and grandfather would have regularly stayed between Ariège and Aude,” also writes the regional daily.
“Wednesday, as often, I drove at night. Around 2 o’clock, between two pharmacies, near Chalabre in Aude (about a hundred kilometers south-east of Toulouse, Editor’s note), I came across a young man on the road. He was walking while the rain was falling in heavy drops. The second time I passed him, I decided to offer to drop him off somewhere,” said The Dispatch this delivery driver, Fabien Accidini, also a chiropractic student.
“He said that his mother had kidnapped him (…). Since then, he had lived in Spain in a luxury house with around ten people. He would have arrived in France around 2021. In the middle of the weekend, he had decided to leave his mother to join his family in England. He had been walking in the mountains for more than four days!”, he said again.