French village astounded missing British teenager lived among them

Residents in a mountainous village in southern France still can’t believe the polite young boy they knew as Zach was Alex Batty, a British teenager who had been missing since 2017.

“We had no idea,” said Camps-sur-l’Agly resident Roger Vales, 79, who lives near the guesthouse where 17-year-old Batty and his grandfather appear to have stayed.

“They were nice people. The boy, when we drove past, we’d see him and say hello. And the grandpa, we’d often spot him working, fixing up walls,” the local council member said.

Alex Batty, who went missing six years ago as a 11-year-old, resurfaced in the middle of the night last week when a driver picked him up in a mountainous area of southern France.

Police suspect his mother, Melanie Batty — who did not have parental guardianship — and grandfather David Batty of having abducted him in 2017, under the pretence of going on holiday in Spain.

A French deputy prosecutor said it was believed the young boy spent two of those six years in France.

He is thought to have first stayed in Camps-sur-l’Agly, a tiny village that is home to several dozen people and some cows in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Frederic Hambye and Ingrid Beauve, two Belgians who own the La Bastide guesthouse in the village, have said that Alex Batty first stayed with them in late 2021.

“Zach first arrived at the guesthouse at the end of the autumn of 2021,” their statement said.

He was supposed to stay without his mother for several days or weeks, contributing to the converted farm’s maintenance in exchange for bed and board. He then stayed again for several periods of varying lengths.

The teenager helped out in the garden and “liked to cook,” their statement said.

– Saucepan of pasta –
The owners were absent when AFP visited the guesthouse on Monday.

But a sign hanging near the entrance welcomed guests, and a wind chime danced above the main door.

A saucepan of pasta and sauce lay abandoned on the stove, not far from two long wooden tables where Alex and his grandfather likely shared meals.

The village’s mayor, Rolande Alibert, refused to speak to AFP, saying she was “tired” of speaking to the media after much of the British press started camping out on the narrow road outside her home.

Policemen who came to her home on Monday afternoon gently asked journalists to leave her alone.

Alex returned to Britain on Saturday to be reunited with his grandmother, Susan Caruana, who the British press has said is his legal guardian.

French network BFMTV caught a glimpse of him, a white hoodie hiding his face, outside his family home in the northern English town of Oldham on Monday.

“I’m glad to be here for Christmas,” the channel quoted the boy as telling its reporter outside his home, adding he declined to speak on camera. “I am sorry, I can’t talk to you because of the probe,” he said.

A student working as a delivery driver, Fabien Accidini, picked Alex up between two villages in the pouring rain in the small hours of Thursday morning.

After hearing his story, he lent him his mobile phone so he could contact his grandmother in England via Facebook, and they got in touch with police.

– ‘Conspiracists’ –
The boy told investigators he had lived a nomadic life in Spain, Morocco and then France as part of a “spiritual community”.

A French deputy prosecutor last week said Alex decided to escape when his mother announced she was going to Finland, where she “likely” now was.

Near the guesthouse, British expatriate Susie Harrison, 61, said she had met Melanie Batty at a market some 75 kilometres (45 miles) away in October 2021.

She told her she was called Rose.

“Rose and her father, I could see they were conspiracists,” Harrison told AFP, recalling how when she told her new acquaintance she had been ill with COVID-19, she said the disease did not exist.

Melanie, she felt, was looking for a “spiritual community — not so much a community to become a part of, but one to lead herself”, she said.

“But the son he was such a lovely boy — friendly, kind, polite, healthy,” she said.

“You wouldn’t know that there was some strange story behind it.”