Alex Battle reappeared around 570 miles from where he initially went missing (Picture: Metro Graphics)

Six long years after he initially disappeared, Alex Batty appears to have been found again – and not where anyone expected.

When he was 11 years old, at the beginning of October 2017, Alex flew over to Málaga with his mum Melanie and grandfather David.

The family was going to take a week-long holiday in the town of Benahavís on the Costa del Sol, located roughly halfway between the southern Spanish city and Gibraltar.

But on October 8, the day when the family was originally meant to return to England, they were nowhere to be found.

For more than half a decade, police were unable to trace the missing child.

It was believed that his mother had taken him abroad to ‘live an alternative lifestyle’, much to the despair of his grandmother and official legal guardian Sue Caruana, who stayed behind in Oldham, Greater Manchester.

Following extensive inquiries, in 2019 officers said they believed Melanie may have tried to bring Alex with her to Melilla in Morocco, via the Port of Málaga.

Ms Caruana previously said her ex-husband and daughter had lived with Alex in a Moroccan commune in 2014.

However, his apparent reappearance today did not come in Spain or Morocco – it was in the town of Revel, about an hour’s drive east of Toulouse in the south of France.

Now 17, Alex is understood to have been spotted while walking late at night in heavy rain.

He was picked up by a driver named Fabien Accidini, who later told police the teenager said he had been living as part of a ‘spiritual community’ in a luxury home in Spain with around 10 people.

Mr Accidini told French media Alex had come to France in 2021, and said he had been wandering the mountains in the south of the country for four days in an effort to get back to England.

Melanie and David Batty are still wanted by police in connection with the boy’s disappearance.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said in a statement: ‘We are supporting a British national in France and are in contact with local authorities.’