Leroy said on Friday that the teenager decided to escape when his mother announced she was going to go to Finland Copyright AFP Ed JONES
Alex Batty, a British teen who went missing six years ago and was found this week in France, boarded a plane for London on Saturday, the Toulouse public prosecutor told AFP.
The 17yearold boarded a KLM flight to the British capital, via Amsterdam, “accompanied by British police officers”, said magistrate Antoine Leroy.
Batty will be returned to his maternal grandmother, with whom the British justice system entrusted his custody before his mother abducted him, aged 11, in 2017 while on holiday in Spain.
For six years, including two in France, he lived a “nomadic” life in a “spiritual “community”, never staying more than several months in the same place.
The teen was found in the middle of Wednesday night by a delivery driver after he had escaped and was walking along a road for four days, a deputy prosecutor had said at a press conference on Friday evening.
He is in good health and does not appear to have been abused in the years since his abduction, according to the doctor who examined him.
His mother, Melanie Batty, has yet to be found and could be in Finland, Leroy said.
Alex Batty told investigators he had not suffered any physical violence during the past six years, but said he had been “sexually abused when he was… five or six years old”.
Leroy said on Friday that the teenager decided to escape when his mother announced she was going to go to Finland, where she is “likely” to be now.
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