2023-12-22 13:45:56
Alex Batty, the 17-year-old teenager found in France last week six years following his disappearance, explained that he wanted to return to the United Kingdom to secure his future and admitted to having invented part of his story, in an interview published on Friday by the tabloid The Sun.
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The young man had disappeared while on vacation in Spain with his mother – who did not have his custody – and his grandfather in 2017 and was found last Wednesday in the middle of the night by a delivery driver while walking along of a road near Toulouse.
He returned to Oldham, in the Manchester region (North), on December 16, following six years of a nomadic life with his mother and grandfather.
“I started thinking regarding leaving when I was 14 or 15,” explained the young man, “I realized that it wasn’t a very good lifestyle for my future.” He says he wants to become a computer engineer.
“No friends, no social life. Work, work, work but no study. This is the life I imagined I would live if I stayed with mom,” he said.
“It would always be the same, whether in France or Spain,” he added, “in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere, no one my age.”
“So when I turned 16 I talked to Grandad regarding going back to England,” he explained, “My mother was once morest the idea. She was very anti-government, anti-vax.”
“She wasn’t really open to any other opinions,” he said.
He says he was around midnight on December 11, following an argument with his mother, with a backpack filled with four t-shirts, three pairs of pants, a skateboard, a flashlight, 100 euros and a Swiss army knife, with the idea of reach the nearest city, Toulouse, 110 kilometers to the north.
He said he made up the story that he walked four days through the mountains to cover his tracks, fearing his mother and grandfather would be arrested for child abduction.
“I lied to try to protect my mother and grandfather, but I realize they are probably going to get caught anyway,” he said.
“I slept outside on the ground, it was freezing,” he told The Sun. He says he covered around thirty kilometers in two days.
He describes his mother, for whom he left a note before his departure, as “a good person, but not a good mother.”
As for his return to Manchester, “it was raining, as usual,” he said, recounting his reunion with his grandmother, trembling before taking her in his arms.
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