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Six years after he disappeared with his mother and grandfather, Alex Batty was finally found by a student working as a delivery driver in the foothills of the Pyrenees in south-western France.
It was the middle of the night and Fabien Accidini was taking medicines to local pharmacies near the village of Chalabre.
Rain was falling when he drove past a young man walking on the side of an unlit, mountain road at about 03:00 on Wednesday.
The Toulouse student did not know it yet, but he had stumbled on a 17-year-old who had decided to abandon his mother’s life in an itinerant, spiritual commune in search of his grandmother in England. He had already been walking in the Pyrenees for four days.
The boy was blond, quite tall, wearing a white sweater and black jeans and was using a torch in the dark. He had a skateboard under his arm and a rucksack on his back, said Fabien Accidini, who is studying to be a chiropractor.
He was intrigued. What was this young man doing in the middle of the night in the rain?
He drove back, stopped and offered the teenager a lift. The boy climbed in. To start with he called himself Zach and came across as quite shy,
“We tried to speak in French but I noticed his French wasn’t great and I decided to speak to him in English,” he told La Dépêche du Midi.
“We talked for more than three hours. He very quickly revealed his true identity, Alex Batty, then told me his story. He described how his mother had kidnapped him when he was 12.”
Melanie Batty and Alex’s grandfather David Batty had travelled from Greater Manchester for a week-long holiday in Marbella in September 2017.
According to the student’s account, the teenager had initially lived with another 10 people in a luxurious house in Spain before heading to France four years later.
By now it was 2021, and he and his mother had joined a “slightly odd spiritual commune… far from a normal lifestyle” in the valleys of the Pyrenees. He made no mention of his grandfather.
The delivery driver told French TV that Alex Batty did not really know where he had been living, only that it was somewhere in the mountains between the two regions of Ariège and Aude along the south-west border with Spain.
Fabien Accidini searched for his name on the internet and realised who he was.
The teenager was thirsty. He had money but no phone, so Fabien Accidini lent him his mobile and he used the driver’s Facebook account to get in touch with his grandmother, Susan Caruana, who is also his legal guardian.
His first words to his grandmother for six years were very brief: “Hello grandma it is me Alex i am in France Toulouse i really hope that you recieve [sic] this message i love you i want to come home.”
The student told French TV that the teenager felt relieved to have left the travelling commune.
“He didn’t want to spend his whole life in that commune. He wanted to have a real life with a real future.”
Although he believed the boy had escaped, Fabien Accidini had no sense that he had been locked up in any way and was free to leave.
UK detectives are keen to track down his mother and grandfather.
Alex Batty appeared to be keen to be taken to an embassy in a big French city, but the student decided to contact the gendarmerie, the French military police.
He drove to Revel, just outside Carcassonne, and left him with the local gendarmes who checked his identity and he is now in Toulouse in the hands of French authorities.
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