16 December 2023 , 13:39
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Alex Batty will be reunited with his family after six long years as he's expected to arrive back in the UK later this afternoon.
Toulouse deputy prosecutor Antoine Leroy today announced the 17-year-old would be on a flight from Toulouse Blagnac airport to London ‘accompanied by members of the British police services.’ He will then transfer on to his grandmother’s house in Oldham, Greater Manchester, for an emotional reunion.
The 17-year-old was officially being searched for everywhere after spending the last six years living in a ‘nomadic spiritual community’ with his mother. Melanie Batty, 48, allegedly kidnapped him when he was just 11 and officially under the guardianship of his grandmother, Susan Caruana, 68, from Oldham, Greater Manchester.
Alex finally handed himself over to gendarmes this week after claiming he spent four days walking across countryside. He told a delivery driver who found him on the side of a rural road in south west France on Wednesday: "I need a future."
Susan Caruana, who was Alex's official guardian when he was abducted (CHRIS NEILL)Earlier today, it emerged that the missing teen tried to enrol at a French school last month, but nobody worked out who he was and police had taken no action.
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On Saturday the local La Depeche newspaper reported that Alex in fact tried to "enrol in a school" in the town of Quillan in November. He could not provide any identity papers, so teachers contacted police about the British teenager, who spoke little French.
A hippy market square in Esperaza, France (The Daily Mirror)"The gendarmes tried to contact the English authorities," said a source, but "there was a hiccup which did not allow the report to be followed up. Collaboration [between the French and the British] did not make it possible to establish a link between the presence of Alex Batty in Quillan and his disappearance notice issued seven years earlier in England."
Alex was just 11 when he was taken (PA)The slip-up shows how far away combined police forces working through the international crime agency Interpol were from finding the vulnerable boy.
Antoine Leroy, the Toulouse deputy prosecutor, said Alex was finally expected to make an emotional return home to Oldham ‘this weekend’. On Saturday he was still in the care of French social services, as gendarmes tried to find his mother. She was with his late grandfather, David Batty, when Alex went missing on a week-long family holiday to Spain in 2017. They embarked on a travelling lifestyle, which did not involve a formal education for Alex.