Bags of bones may be Corrie’s, says his mum
‘Really difficult to wait for an answer’
THE mother of missing airman Corrie McKeague fears that bones found in bin bags in a river may be those of her son.
Nicola Urquhart said she was ‘trying to keep a sensible head on’ after police told her they had not been able to identify the remains.
The bags were discovered in the River Stour in Sudbury, Suffolk, on Thursday last week – 16 miles from where Mr McKeague vanished in 2016.
Police launched a murder inquiry and carried out a post-mortem examination on the bones – but said they were ‘not able to establish any form of identification or cause of death’. Mrs Urquhart said: ‘Most times when remains or bodies have been found, the police down in Suffolk have been able to put my mind at rest that it’s not Corrie very quickly.
‘After speaking to me, they’ll be able to tell me that they already think they know who the person is or, for whatever reason, they know it’s not Corrie.
‘Unfortunately, on this occasion, they’ve not been able to do that.’
Suffolk Police said more tests are being done but this will be a ‘lengthy process’.
Mr McKeague, of Dunfermline, Fife, was 23 when he vanished on a night out in Bury St Edmunds. He had been a gunner and was stationed at RAF Honington in Suffolk. After last week’s discovery, Mrs Urquhart said: ‘I think the hard thing is that, whether this is Corrie or not, this is somebody’s son or daughter – and it’s whether anybody will ever find out, because they might not be able to identify who this person is.
‘It’s just about trying to keep a sensible head on, and not letting your head start making things up and thinking a million thoughts.’ She told the East Anglian Daily Times: ‘It is really difficult just to wait until you get an answer because there’s as much chance of this not being Corrie as it being Corrie... It’s just awful.’
The investigation into Mr McKeague’s disappearance was passed to cold case detectives in 2018.
Police said the most likely scenario was that Mr McKeague had been sleeping in a bin that was emptied into a lorry, and ended up buried in a landfill site after being crushed to death.
CCTV footage had placed him in the area of several large bins. Waste firm Biffa said one of the bins had been heavier than usual.
Police spent 137 days trawling through more than 7,000 tons of rubbish at a landfill site in Milton, Cambridgeshire, but no trace of him has been found.