Alex Batty disappeared in 2017, at the age of 11. This young Briton, who is now 17 years old, was found this week near Toulouse and he should quickly be repatriated to England, near Manchester where he is from, and returned to his grandmother, who has the guard.
“We’re waiting for grandma to come pick him up. We are waiting to put repatriation in place with the British,” Toulouse public prosecutor Samuel Vuelta-Simon told Agence France-Presse on Friday.
“Our priority is to bring him back to the United Kingdom,” said Greater Manchester police, in the northwest of England. Alex Batty is “expected” in “the coming days”, added his deputy chief commissioner, Chris Sykes, at a press conference.
Currently, the young man “is sheltered, social services have taken care of him,” said the Toulouse prosecutor, without specifying the exact location where he was. “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, there is no problem. »
A “spiritual community” in Morocco
“I’m very happy,” Susan Caruana, the teenager’s grandmother, told British newspaper The Sun on Thursday. “I spoke to him this afternoon and there’s no doubt it’s him. When he was with us, I was talking to a child, now I'm talking to a man,” she also told the Times. “It’s so incredible not to know if someone is dead or alive,” Ms. Caruana told the British daily.
According to the BBC, citing a police source, the young man, who is in good health, claimed not to have suffered ill-treatment.
He disappeared in 2017 while on vacation abroad with his mother and grandfather. “The mother and grandfather (…) have not been found, but they are still wanted in connection with this disappearance”, according to the BBC.
His grandmother said in 2018 that she believed Alex's mother and grandfather, from whom she is divorced, took him to live in a "spiritual community" in Morocco.
According to La Dépêche du Midi, Alex Batty was picked up by a medicine deliveryman to pharmacies, who encountered him "around 2 o'clock" in the morning on the side of a road, in Aude, during the night from Tuesday to Wednesday , a version corroborated by a source close to the case.
