UK Boy Missing for 6 Years Is Found in France

A British youth who disappeared six years ago at age 11 has been found alive and well in France, reports the BBC. A delivery driver told a French newspaper that he stopped to offer Alex Batty a lift as the teen was walking with a backpack in heavy rain on a rural road, per the Guardian. The driver says the 17-year-old told him that he'd been living with his mother as part of an "itinerant commune" in southern France, and that he'd had enough. "He wasn't under any compulsion but he said he found his mother a bit weird and decided he didn't want this kind of life, and that he wanted to set his own path—that's why he decided to leave."

At the time Alex disappeared from Britain, he was under the legal guardianship of his grandmother, Susan Caruana. The boy had gone on a vacation trip to Spain with his mother and Caruana's ex-husband, and the trio never returned. Caruana has said for years she suspected her daughter abducted the boy because she didn't believe in a traditional upbringing that included schooling. Alex is now in the care of social services, and authorities are working to return him to Britain. "I spoke to him this afternoon and it is definitely him," Caruana tells the UK Times. (More missing person stories.)