Missing airman is due to become a father, girlfriend reveals

The girlfriend of an RAF serviceman who vanished on a night out has revealed she is expecting his child.

Corrie Mckeague, 23, from Fife, was last seen in the early hours of 24 September in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.

His girlfriend April Oliver, 21, said she discovered she was pregnant in October – just weeks after Mr Mckeague’s disappearance.

Miss Oliver, from Norfolk, said: “I’ve had to make a massive decision by myself. I was hoping and praying that he’d come back so we could make the decision together.”

Mr Mckeague, a gunner and team medic, was separated from friends while leaving the Flex nightclub on St Andrews Street South.

He was last seen in Bury St Edmunds town centre on CCTV at 3:25am, wearing a light pink Ralph Lauren shirt and white jeans. The sighting shows him walking from a doorway and into a horseshoe-shaped area in Brentgovel Street, with no sign of him emerging.

Miss Oliver said she saw him shortly before his disappearance and was on holiday in the US when he went missing.

Shetoldthebbcshereturned to the UK as soon as she heard.

“I have the support of my family and friends around me, which is great, but it’s still not the most pleasant thing to go through on your own, especially when the person you love is missing,” she said.

“I’ve given it a great deal of thought. Obviously there is the element of, ‘What if he didn’t come back?’ what would I do, and that was something I had to take a sensible approach to.

“When I found out, although it was a horrible time and something I wished I could experience with him, it was also something I was excited about.”

Asked about when she discovered he was missing, she said: “I had only been there a few days when I got the call from the RAF boys asking if I’d seen him or heard from him, that’s when I knew that he was missing. I very quickly got a plane home.

“At that point I wasn’t entirely sure what had happened to him. It was completely out of character.”

The pair had been together for about five months after meeting on a dating site.

Mr Mckeague’s mother, Nicola Urquhart, a police officer from Dunfermline, said: “It’s incredibly difficult to bounce my head from the excitement of a new baby to what we’re actually trying to focus on, which is finding Corrie.”

There have been no clues to the whereabouts of the gunner who was based at RAF Honington.

0 Nicola Urquhart, left, with April Oliver and a scan of her baby