Missing Brit boy found alive in France after six years explains why he didn't come home sooner

Alex Batty, a boy who went missing while on holiday in Spain in 2017 only to be found alive six years later, has explained why he didn't come home sooner.

Alex was 11 when he was on holiday with his mother Melanie and his grandfather David for what was supposed to be a week-long stay, but the family didn't return on their scheduled arrival date.

Six years later in 2023 delivery driver Fabien Accidini had been driving through the French Pyrenees at 3am, despite the pouring rain and pitch black of night he spotted a teenager walking along the road carrying a skateboard, who turned out to be Alex.

It turned out that Alex, now 17, had been going by the name Zack Edwards as his mum and grandfather took the boy across Spain, Morocco and France before he realised it 'wasn’t a great way to live for my future'.

"Moving around. No friends, no social life. Working, working, work and not studying. That’s the life I imagined I would be leading if I were to stay with my mum," Alex explained, as he planned to leave her a goodbye note and then start walking towards Toulouse for four days and nights.

Alex's story will be told in the upcoming BBC Three documentary Kidnapped by My Mum, which will be on TV next week (13 May), where he retraces the steps he took to leave.

He had spoken to ITV shortly after returning to the UK about why he hadn't tried to get home sooner, explaining that he didn't want to get his mum and grandad in trouble.

He said: "That's why I didn't come home sooner. All I worried about was them getting locked up.

"We stayed in a lot of caravans and we stayed in a lot of houses, always up mountains hours away from any kind of village or anything like that.

"One day I just thought, 'ok, I can't take this anymore'. I knew that everything was already kind of in place for them to leave where we were so if I were to have left, they would be gone by the time the police arrived."

Back in 2018 he'd sent a message to his grandma, who he moved in with after returning to the UK, saying he was happier with his mum and grandad, but when he had been found he sent her another message saying: "I love you I want to come home."

French law enforcement said one of the reasons why Alex decided to leave when he did was due to a concern she might try and relocate him to Finland.

Alex had also said that while he was with his mum he didn't get to go to school and there was only one other child around his age, so he developed his reading skills by going through the Harry Potter books about 20 times.

Instead of school he said he was working 'five hours a day, five days a week' in exchange for food and shelter, Alex tried teaching himself what he could and passed an entrance exam to a computer coding school in Perpignan, but couldn't go because he had no ID.

Kidnapped by My Mum will be available to watch on BBC Three at 9pm on 13 May, and will subsequently be available on BBC iPlayer.