Relatives mark one year on for Corrie

Relatives of a missing Fife airman have marked the first anniversary of his disappearance by retracing his last known steps.

Nicola Urquhart said she wanted to do “something positive” to help police in the ongoing search for her son Corrie McKeague, who has not been seen since September 24 2016.

A year on, Nicola joined Corrie’s brothers Makeyan and Darroch and his uncle Tony Wringe in Bury St Edmunds, where the 23-year-old was last captured on CCTV, and walked people through the route Corrie took on the night before he vanished.

Suffolk Police believe the RAF gunner may have been taken to a landfill site after falling asleep in a bin, although a painstaking 20-week search of the landfill in Milton, Cambridgeshire, failed to find any trace of him.

“As the investigation continues, we would like to do something positive especially on this day, to assist the police in trying to find Corrie,” Nicola said.

“This is being done in the hope that we may jog someone’s memory that may have been out that night or has heard something since, or that after seeing the route and hearing the facts, may ask a question we have not thought of yet.

“Now is not the time to give up and sit quietly somewhere to remember Corrie.”

On the night he disappeared, Corrie, from Dunfermline, was asked to leave Flex nightclub at about 1am and became separated from his friends.

CCTV footage showed him buying takeaway food, sitting down and eating it on a doorstep and subsequently falling asleep, before he was then seen to wake up and continue his journey.

Police investigating the case later matched the movements of Corrie’s mobile phone signal to the path of a bin lorry that visited the area in the early hours of the morning he went missing – prompting the theory he may have somehow been in a bin.

That was subsequently supported when it emerged that the bin lorry had been carrying a much heavier load than first thought.

However, search teams scouring more than 6,300 tonnes of landfill and incinerator waste did not find Corrie and the search of the site was called off in July.

To mark the first anniversary, family members and supporters gathered in Langton Place, near So Bar, which is where Corrie started his night out, and ended in an area known as the Horseshoe, which is where Corrie was last seen on CCTV.

Officers from Suffolk Police also spent time on Friday evening in the town centre to highlight the ongoing missing person investigation.

Corrie has not been seen since September 24 2016.