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British teen missing for 6 years returns to UK. Here's what he told authorities
Alex Batty disappeared from Spain in 2017 and was found by a delivery driver earlier this week in France.
Alex Batty, a British teen who went missing six years ago and was found in France earlier this week, has arrived back in the United Kingdom, news agency AFP reported citing the police.
"It gives me great pleasure to say Alex has now made his safe return back to the UK after six years," Matt Boyle of Greater Manchester Police told reporters.
Boyle said Batty was accompanied from France by British police officers and a family member.
"This moment was undoubtedly huge for him and his loved ones, and we are glad that they have been able to see each other again after all this time," he added.
Batty disappeared after going on holiday with his mother and grandfather in Spain in 2017.
The teen was found in the middle of the night by a delivery driver on December 14 in southwestern France after he had walked along a road for four days.
Batty will now stay with his maternal grandmother, with whom the British justice system had entrusted his custody before his mother abducted him.
"I can't wait to see him when we are reunited," Alex's grandmother Susan Caruana said in a statement, according to AFP.
Earlier, Toulouse assistant prosecutor Antoine Leroy said that the teen's mother, Melanie Batty, is yet to be found and could be in Finland.
According to doctors who examined the teen, he is in good health and does not appear to have been abused in the years since his abduction.
Alex Batty's disappearance
In 2018, Caruana told the BBC that she believed Batty's mother and grandfather David Batty took him to live with a spiritual community in Morocco. She said that the two were seeking an alternative lifestyle and did not want Batty to go to school.
For six years, including two in France, Batty lived a "nomadic" life in a "spiritual "community", never staying more than several months in the same place.
Batty told investigators that he had spent time in a spiritual community centre focused on “work on the ego, meditation and reincarnation”, before moving to the French Pyrenees, along the border with Spain.
Leroy said that the teenager decided to escape when his mother announced she was going to go to Finland.
The delivery driver, Fabien Accidini, who found Batty on Wednesday said he saw the teenager walking along a road in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
"He explained that he had been walking for four days, that he set off from a place in the mountains, though he didn't say where," Accidini told earlier. “I typed his name into the internet and saw that he was being looked for.”
Accidini told AFP that he was a bit suspicious at first, but added that as the boy helped him with his deliveries to local pharmacies, he began to open up.
"When he told me he'd been abducted, I made him say it again – it was crazy!" said Accidini.
He then lent him his mobile phone so he could contact his grandmother in England through Facebook to tell her he wanted to come home, and then he got in touch with the police.
(Inputs from agencies)
