British teenager admits lying to investigators out of fear his mother and grandfather would be arrested

Alex Batty also reveals the reasons for his departure in an interview with a British newspaper.

He is speaking for the first time since his return to Oldahm, in the Manchester area. Alex Batty, the 17-year-old teenager found in France near Toulouse by a delivery driver, reveals in an interview with the tabloid The Sunthe reasons for his departure and announces having hidden certain elements of his journey from the police.

“I lied to try to protect my mother and grandfather, but I realize they’re probably going to get caught anyway”, tells the young Briton to the tabloid. Alex Batty explains that he lied to investigators about his story and his identity, to cover his tracks, for fear that his mother and grandfather would be arrested for child kidnapping.

In search of a new future

On December 11, after an argument with his mother, the teenager decided to fill his backpack with some things, took with him 100 euros and a Swiss army knife with the idea of ​​going alone to the nearest city, Toulouse, 110 kilometers. “I slept outside on the ground, it was freezing”, he told the daily. He says he covered around thirty kilometers in two days. The Briton describes his mother, for whom he left a note before his departure, as “a good person, but not a good mother”.

After six years of a life of homelessness with his mother and grandfather, the teenager who now wants to become a computer engineer, is looking for a “new future”. “When I was 16, I talked to Grandpa about going back to England.”he explains, “my mother was against the idea. She was very anti-government, antivax”. Asked about his life in the Pyrenees, Alex Patty describes a daily life marked by solitude “in the middle of nowhere”. “No friends, no social life. Work, work, work but no study. This is the life I imagined I would live if I stayed with mom”he explains.