A British boy who went missing in Spain six years ago has been found “alive and well” after escaping from a “spiritual community” in France.
Alex Batty, from Oldham, Lancashire, was 11 when he did not return from a family holiday near Marbella with his mother Melanie Batty, then 37, and his grandfather David Batty, 58, in 2017.
His grandmother and legal guardian, Susan Caruana, said in 2018 she believed Alex may have been taken to Morocco as part of his mother’s pursuit of an “alternative lifestyle”. She had taken him to a commune there on a previous trip.
Prosecutors said the teenager, now 17, had been found near Toulouse after escaping a rural community. The boy reportedly said he had not been trapped in the commune, but wanted to “set his own path”.
Must admit I wouldn’t like to live in tents for 6 years either.
had been found near Toulouse
Assuming that’s a “literal”, can you really blame him?
I see that the family member who isn’t Batty is the one who’s the legal guardian.
Nobody likes To Lose.
(C) local panto.
It’s quite a strange story
“Leroy said that Batty told him that he “decided to flee the community in which he lived,” because he was worried his mother would take him to Finland. According to Leroy, she is “likely” there “as we speak.”
“He himself uses the term ‘spiritual community’,” Leroy said, adding that “they travelled from house to house with solar panels, always car-pooling, always in places where there were large houses, where there were several families.””
I guess it is a sign of how debased our culture has become that no one seems even to be asking the six basic questions, let alone looking for answers. We have some odd sketchy data on who?
No one seems to be asking why, when, where, what? And looming over everything…. How the f!!!! did it happen?
When Madeleine Mccann went missing, the whole country went berserk for about a year. In this case, nobody seems at all curious. Is it a colossal cock up by the police and social services?
@Diogenes
It seems the rest of the family knew him to be with his mother (but nobody knew where), in which case I’m not sure there’s much the authorities could or should have done about it.
Except that the mother had been removed as legal guardian after abandoning the poor mite in Morocco and pissing off to Bali with random bloke #915. Granny had to pay for the wee mite to come back from Morocco and then get him settled into a school in Oldham (not sure which is worse actually)
The mistake granny made was trusting her daughter again to take him on vacation to Spain in 2017, but as others have said, plod should have been on this like a fly on shit, but Alex wasn’t the son of some uppity “doctor” so plod just went through the motions.
@ John Galt
Uppity doctors that were so used to treating their patients with no compassion that they forgot they weren’t meant to kill their daughter. I believe it’s now called the Praia da Luz Pathway.