Oldham teenager Alex Batty fears mum will be jailed for his disappearance

Alex Batty, the teenager from Oldham who went missing six years ago, has expressed his fears that his mum and grandad may face jail over his disappearance.

Alex went missing in 2017 while on a holiday in Spain with the two family members. He was 11 at the time.

Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, the now 17-year-old said: “That’s why I didn’t come home sooner – all I worried about was them getting locked up.”

His grandmother, Susan Caruana, who is his legal guardian, agreed. “That’s the last thing I would want. I don’t want them to go to prison,” she said.

It comes after Greater Manchester Police said detectives had launched a criminal investigation into alleged child abduction as they work towards understanding the circumstances surrounding Alex’s disappearance.

Alex was on a pre-agreed holiday with his mum, Melanie and his grandfather, David Batty, where it was arranged that they would take him away for a week on September 30th, 2017.

However, Alex did not return after a week and was last seen at the Port of Malaga on October 8th of the same year.

He told hosts Susanna Reid and Richard Madeley he spent years ’emotionally preparing’ to leave his mother and grandfather, adding that he ‘knew it was time’. 

Last month, the teenager turned up at a police station in France after a delivery driver spotted him walking along a road in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, near Toulouse.

Alex said he was getting ‘fed up’ of the nomadic lifestyle he was living along with his mum and grandad. He said: “We stayed in a lot of caravans. We stayed in a lot of houses, always up mountains hours away from any kind of village. One day I just thought ‘ok, I can’t take this any more’.

“I knew everything was in place for them to leave where we were, so if I were to leave, everything would be gone by the time the police arrived.”

Now back living with his grandmother in Oldham, Alex spoke of how he is adjusting back to ordinary life as a teenage boy in the UK.

“I’ve had one friend in the past six years – everyone else has been a lot older than me so I’m very comfortable talking to adults but with children my age it is different,” he said.

Susan said she had to learn to live with the pain of her grandson being gone. She said: “It took a long time to learn to live with it. I wasn’t worried about him coming back someday, I was more worried I wouldn’t still be around.

“Now he is home all those fears have gone. It’s amazing. It’s amazing to wake up and not have that pain in the pit of my stomach.”

Despite having to get used to normality, Alex said his current ambitions were to go to college to study Computer Science, get a part-time job and to organise a night out for his 18th birthday next month.