Missing airman’s body may never be found after tip hunt called off
POLICE hunting missing airman Corrie Mckeague have admitted he may never be found after a £1.2 million search of a landfill site ended in failure.
Detectives said they still believed his body was at the site, but after 20 weeks of sifting through 6,500 tons of rubbish they had found no sign of the RAF gunner.
The officer leading the hunt for Mr Mckeague, 23, stormed out of a press conference after saying the search of the site had been halted.
Det Supt Katie Elliott of Suffolk Police got out of her chair and left the room after saying that everything possible had been done to find Mr Mckeague. Earlier she said she still believed that his body was buried somewhere under tons of rubbish at the 120-acre site in Milton, Cambridgeshire.
Police believe he probably climbed into a wheelie bin behind a Greggs takeaway to sleep after an evening of heavy drinking.
Ms Elliott said she had credible information from a witness that Mr Mckeague had done something similar before during a night out. The RAF Regiment airman from Fife, Dunfermline, is thought to have been scooped up by a bin lorry when the bin was emptied early on Sept 24 last year.
Ms Elliott denied that the search of the site had been halted on grounds of cost after she admitted that the hunt had so far cost £1.2million.
She said that the search had been carried out in an area where waste was dumped over the period Mr Mckeague went missing. But she said officers had now finished searching the area where rubbish was 26ft deep and had no further information about where they should be looking.
Ms Elliott added: “It is not a matter of cost. The investigation has never been about money. We searched the areas where we had information that the waste was deposited. Beyond that it is very difficult to establish where we would look for Corrie.”
Ms Elliott said Mr Mckeague’s family had been told the search of the tip was being called off.
She said: “I can only imagine it must be devastating, not to have found him.
“Our thoughts are with Corrie’s family as we had hoped that this search would have provided them with the answers about what happened to him.”
Mr Mckeague, who was based at RAF Honington, Suffolk, was last seen on CCTV at 3.25am on Sept 24 as he walked into the refuse collection area in Bury St Edmunds. Police quickly realised that the movement of his mobile phone signal matched that of the lorry which had picked up the contents of the Greggs wheelie bin. The signal from the phone stopped at around the time the lorry reached Barton Mills.
Bin lorry operator Biffa initially stated that their records showed the wheelie bin behind Greggs had contained only 11kg of waste.
Officers asked for the calculation to be checked and Biffa admitted in March that it had made a mistake and the bin contained more than 100kg – enough to include a body.