Boy missing for 6 years was taken to ‘spiritual community’ by mother

• Alex Batty went missing aged 11 in 2017 while on vacation with his mother and grandfather.
• He was found on Wednesday walking along a mountain road in France.
• His mother likely took him to pursue an “alternative lifestyle,” his grandmother said.

A British boy who went missing after going on a family vacation to Spain has been found nearly six years later, walking along a road in France.

Alex Batty, now 17, had gone on vacation with his mother and grandfather, neither of whom had guardianship of him when he disappeared, in 2017, the BBC said.

His grandmother, Susan Caruana, said in 2018 that she thought they had gone to pursue an “alternative lifestyle” and did not want him to go to school.

Batty told French authorities that he was taken to Morocco, where they spent two years before living a nomadic lifestyle, moving around the Pyrenees mountain range that straddles the border of France and Spain.

The boy was found walking along the road early on Wednesday morning in the Pyrenees’ foothills by Fabien Accidini, a driver.

“He explained that he had been walking for four days, that he set off from a place in the mountains, though he didn’t say where,” Accidini said, per the BBC.

Accidini said he searched Batty’s name on the internet and saw that he was being looked for.

He then contacted French authorities to help.

The boy told Accidini he had lived in a luxury house in Spain with about 10 people as part of a “spiritual community” before he moved to France around 2021.

Batty used Accidini’s Facebook account to send a message to his grandmother, saying: “Hello Grandma, it’s me, Alex. I’m in France Toulouse. I really hope that you receive this message. I love you, I want to come home.”

“I am so happy. I have spoken to him, and he is well,” Caruana told The Sun. “It is such a shock.”

Batty said that he decided to leave the Pyrenees when his mother told him they needed to move to Finland, although it is not clear why she was making the move, the BBC said.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said, per the BBC: “We are supporting a British national in France and are in contact with local authorities.”