Alex Batty, who disappeared six years ago with his mother and grandfather, has been found in a remote mountainous area in the Pyrenees by a French student working as a delivery driver. Fabien Accidini stumbled upon the 17-year-old while delivering medicines to local pharmacies near the village of Chalabre in the middle of the night. He was intrigued by a young man walking at the side of an unlit mountain road in the rain. The teenager called himself Zach and came across as quite shy, but they talked for more than three hours, and he soon revealed his true identity.
Alex Batty had abandoned his mother’s life in an itinerant, spiritual commune in search of his grandmother in England when she decided to move to Finland. He had already been walking in the Pyrenees for four days and four nights, sleeping by day and walking mainly by night to escape being seen. All he had was €100 in cash, no mobile phone, and he was heading for Toulouse. He had been living in a commune of about 10 people in a luxurious house in Spain before joining a “slightly odd spiritual commune… far from a normal lifestyle” in the valleys of the Pyrenees where they traveled in a community of around 10 people because of a phobia around certain elements of life.
Alex Batty made no mention of his grandfather to Fabien Accidini, and French prosecutors believe he may have died about six months ago. He said he did not really know where he had been living, only that it was somewhere in the mountains on the French side of the Spanish border, in the regions of Ariège, Aude, or the Eastern Pyrenees. The teenager felt relieved to have escaped as he did not want to spend his whole life in that commune and wanted to have a real life with a real future.
Alex Batty’s intended destination appeared to be an embassy in a big French city, but the student instead contacted the gendarmerie, the French military police. He drove to Revel, just outside Carcassonne, and left him with local gendarmes who checked his identity and took him to Toulouse before he finally heads back to the UK this weekend. The boy, who had no formal schooling and little experience with technology, has come across as composed and intelligent
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