Greater Manchester Police via Reuters
A British boy who disappeared at the age of 11 during a family vacation to Spain in 2017 sent a Facebook message to his grandmother, his legal guardian, this week. “Hello Grandma, it’s me Alex,” the now 17-year-old wrote. “I’m in France Toulouse. I really hope that you receive this message. I love you, I want to come home.”
French media reports say a medical delivery driver came across Batty as he walked in the rain along a road in a town outside Toulouse in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains on Wednesday morning. “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,” driver Fabien Accidini said, according to the BBC.
Accidini said that Batty told him his name, and an internet search revealed that the teenager had been considered missing for years. Batty then used Accidini’s Facebook account to contact his grandmother, Susan Caruana, who hasn’t seen him for over six years.