CORRIE DUMP HUNT
SEARCH FOR AIRMAN BEGINS
MORE than five months after Corrie McKeague vanished, police have finally started sifting the dump where the Scots airman’s missing mobile phone was last traced.
Specialist teams yesterday began scouring 8000 tons of rubbish, lying 26ft deep, at the landfill site detectives identified as a “place of interest” a week after the RAF gunner disappeared.
The grim task is expected to take up to 10 weeks.
For 24 weeks since Corrie went missing, police have put off searching the dump as they pursued the 23-year-old’s secret life as a swinger and theories he was targeted by terrorists.
His heartbroken father, former bin man Martin McKeague, 48, said yesterday: “I know all about what happens to the contents of a bin when it is tipped into the lorry, what happens to make the rubbish more compressed in the back of the truck and how it is emptied at a landfill holding site.
“It’s haunting to think that Corrie may have been in one of those bins, and what may have happened to him.”
Corrie was last seen walking into a horseshoe-shaped refuse area behind shops in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on September 24 last year after a night out.
Nothing has been found to suggest he is still alive since this CCTV sighting at 3.25am. At an early stage in the investigation, police discovered a Biffa lorry picked up the contents of a bin there hours later. Signals from Corrie’s phone matched the vehicle’s journey towards the landfill site in Milton, Cambridgeshire. But because the lorry’s load was recorded as just 33lb, Corrie was not believed to be on board. When asked yesterday about the weight of rubbish, a Suffolk Police spokeswoman said: “It’s one of the things we are looking into. We can’t rule out that Corrie may have travelled on the lorry.
“This search is the next logical step – we had to work through the things that might find him alive first.
“At a very early stage we told the owners of the landfill site to stop dumping rubbish there. We don’t know what we are going to find but we’ve gone through every other possible option.”
Last week, police announced they had arrested a 26-year-old man on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice.
It later emerged he is Haydn Stephens, a special constable who also works as a dispatcher for Biffa.
Corrie’s mum Nicola Urquhart, 48, who lives in Dunfermline and works for Police Scotland, has expressed fears her son will be found at the landfill site.
She said: “I think there’s a good possibility that’s where he could have ended up, because I try to look at it logically.”
Liaison officers are also updating Corrie’s distraught girlfriend April Oliver, 21, who was pregnant at the time he went missing and is due to give birth in the late spring.
Some of the 120,000 members of the Find Corrie Facebook page yesterday criticised the police delay in searching the dump.
Jay Atkinson wrote: “I adamantly believe that this should’ve been one of the first places searched. I hate to say it but I do feel in my gut that he will be found here.”