ANOTHER chapter of the Alex Batty saga has unfolded and a rather wild story explains how the teenager ended up in the isolated and school-free commune in France.
Family friends claim his mother Melanie and grandfather David gave up their lives in a mortgaged house in Greater Manchester to fight ‘the establishment’, the banks and bailiffs.
![Alex Batty, right, pictured in Morocco](https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/b63f010b-3d30-4577-9c5f-919dc86f07bb.jpg)
From anti-eviction Facebook groups to flat-earth conspiracy theories, the duo’s ‘off-the-grid’ philosophy included the belief that a homeowner should not have to pay a mortgage, council tax, electricity, gas or water bills, or have to pay for a TV license. .
In a compilation of accounts from close family sources, The times reported how father and daughter became followers of a movement called the One People’s Public Trust.
The organization claims to have ‘legally foreclosed’ the global system of governments and corporations, implying that all debt, including bank loans, has been wiped out.
Foreclosure is the process of reclaiming property purchased with borrowed money, but the One People’s Public Trust argued that governments owed the people money because of years of illegal taxation and made financial demands.
David and Melanie allegedly formed a belief system based on people they met on Facebook, including a sub-community of homeowners at risk of eviction, The Times reported.
The father-daughter duo befriended activists from ‘Protection from evictions’ and ‘British mortgage challengers’.
Some of them believed that residents should not be required to pay mortgages or bills, and some adopted delaying strategies, such as paying £1 a month to the mortgage lender.
In 2013, David Batty had fought bailiffs who took possession of his small terraced house in Oldham after losing his job in hard times, falling ill and separating from Alex’s grandmother and legal guardian Susan.
Melanie, who was halfway through law school and reportedly “extremely smart, but quite fond of conspiracy theories,” helped her father at the time.
That included forming a protective barrier around her father’s house with 30 people on the day the bailiffs were due to arrive – and with success.
“He didn’t like having to pay bills,” David’s close friend told The Times.
“He ended up losing his house. We told Melanie to appeal the deportation. We have said that if you want to stop the eviction, you must appeal to the court to prevent the repossession order.
“But she said, ‘I don’t want to do that because we’re playing their game.’
‘That’s what they said. They didn’t want to play ‘the game’ anymore.
‘They were tired of paying council tax, gas, electricity, TV license and mortgage.
“They decided to take a different path and chose to take Alex down that path.”
In the anti-eviction groups on Facebook, Melanie and her father reportedly befriended a divorced father and former IT consultant, who claimed he had found a free and limitless energy source.
According to The Times, the man invited the duo to Morocco in 2014 to see a quantum energy generator.
There, in a makeshift laboratory, a crowd cheered and whistled as a mysterious device turned on a dozen light bulbs without any apparent power source.
That year, Melanie took Alex, then eight years old, to live with David in a commune in Morocco.
Some of the group to which the Battys belonged believed in conspiracy theories such as that the Earth is flat, The Times reports.
According to Susan, Melanie would then go to live in Bali with a new boyfriend and leave Alex behind in Morocco.
“I panicked and paid for him a flight home,” Susan said in a 2018 interview.
Alex then went to live with his grandmother, while his mother remained in Bali until the fateful trip to Spain in 2017.
In September that year, Alex, then aged 11, flew from Oldham with his mother and David on the pre-arranged trip to Malaga and never returned.
Melanie, David and Alex are known to have spent several years in Morocco before arriving in France around 2020, where they passed through part of the Pyrenees, below Toulouse.
The Batty family would survive by moving from one place to another in a nomadic community, where they would eat vegetables grown in allotments while Melanie sold solar panels.
David is believed to have died about six months ago, but in a bizarre twist, he was spotted cutting grass just a week ago, neighbors claimed.
Alex lived with his mother and grandfather in a dilapidated house high in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
The simply furnished double holiday home in the hamlet of La Bastide is a more than 30-minute drive from the nearest main road.
Locals say it’s the perfect place to ‘fall off the grid’.
The owner, named Fred, allegedly let the three stay in exchange for work. He declined to comment yesterday.
Neighbors often saw Alex and David working in the garden.
And local mayor Rolande Alibert, 76, said: “Alex always seemed like a very nice and polite young boy.
“He didn’t speak much French, but he always smiled and said ‘Bonjour’ and ‘Au Revoir’.
“I saw him leave this weekend with a bag. He looked good. But I didn’t know why he left. Only after I read about it in the newspaper did I find out the truth.”
French prosecutors claim Alex knew his alternative life with his mother ‘had to stop’ after she planned to move to Finland.
Last month the boy also tried to enroll at a school in Quillan in Ariège, but no one knew who he was and police took no action, French media claimed.
Toulouse Assistant Prosecutor Antoine Leroy said Alex left home and went hiking for four days, covering about 15 miles on foot and by skateboard.
He slept during the day and walked at night, nourished by eating “whatever he found in the fields and gardens.”
Mr Leroy added: “It is possible that the mother went to Finland as she had planned. The grandfather, who was always with his daughter and grandson, is said to have died about six months ago.”
Speaking about Alex’s lifestyle over the past six years, Mr Leroy said: “They worked on the ego, there was meditation work – there was no connection with the real world. They believed in reincarnation.”
Mr Leroy said Alex was tired but in good health, adding: “He is said to be intelligent even though he has never been to school during this period.
“He does not describe any form of physical violence without mentioning emotional violence. We cannot use the term ‘cult’ as such, but it speaks of a spiritual community.”
Mr. Leroy suggested that the group is fascinated by solar panels, and that Melanie is afraid of them.
He added: “They traveled from house to house with solar panels. They only used car sharing, they did not have their own car.”
Alex has now finally been reunited with his family after landing in Britain last night – six years after his mother and grandfather allegedly kidnapped him while on holiday in Spain.
Meanwhile, French authorities are planning a crackdown on communities like those involved in Alex’s case.