Police hope to interview British teenager Alex Batty in the coming days about his “nomadic” life since he vanished six years ago.

Alex was just 11 when he disappeared after going on holiday to Spain with his mum Melanie Batty, 43. It was feared she and her father David Batty, 64, had abducted the boy and taken him with them to live an “alternative” lifestyle in Morocco.

Since then the three of them have also lived in Spain and most recently in the foothills of the French Pyrenees. Last Wednesday Alex, now 17, was found wandering along a country road in south west France near Toulouse, carrying his skateboard.

Alex, wearing a white hoodie and blue jeans, flew back to England on Saturday, to be reunited with his grandmother and legal guardian Susan Caruana, 68, in Oldham, Greater Manchester. After spending his first night in her home, a family member today said he was “doing well” and looking forward to his first Christmas in the UK since 2016.

British police now want to piece together more details about what happened to Alex after he failed to return to the UK from a holiday in Malaga with his mum and grandad in September 2017. The teenager told police in France he decided to leave his mother after she planned to move from their base in the Pyrenees to Finland.

He said his grandfather had died six months ago, although reports in France have suggested Mr Batty is still alive. A police source in Toulouse said: “The boy claims that his mother has gone to Finland to see the Northern Lights, so the search for her is continuing across Europe.

“If she did travel to Finland, then she would absolutely have needed a passport. This would make tracing her journey relatively easy.” The source added: “The British are now leading the investigation and they of course will be interviewing Alex at length. His mother is crucial to the inquiry and she needs to be found.”

It has emerged Alex, using the name Zach, had been living since 2021 with his grandad in a Gite near La Bastide, a remote hamlet 35 miles north west of Perpignan. Frederic Hambye and Ingrid Beauve, who own the Gite, said today Alex and his grandad had helped maintain the building and its garden in return for food and accommodation.

They said Melanie stayed nearby in a “spiritual” community and Alex would visit her at weekends. In a statement they said: “He (Alex) was eager to go school and get back to a normal life and for that he needed his ID which he told us he no longer had. When we learned that he did not have an ID we offered to drive him to the British Consulate.

“He told us he would find a way to return to the UK on his own to get new [identity] papers and go back to school.” Before disappearing with her son, Melanie and her father David had become followers of an anti-establishment movement called the One People’s Public Trust, which claimed to have erased all bank debts. The pair had also previously lived in a commune in Morocco with a group who said they had discovered a way to produce free and limitless energy.