A search of a landfill site in Cambridgeshire will start this week as police look for RAF Honington’s Corrie McKeague, following a two-week delay.
The 23-year-old went missing on a night out in Bury St Edmunds more than five months ago on September 24.
In February, the force announced as part of the investigation it would search around 920sqm of a landfill site at Milton.
Since a signal from Corrie’s mobile phone was detecting travelling along the same route as a bin lorry shortly after he was last seen at 3.24am, police have been aware of the possibility Corrie could be at the landfill site.
“The search is likely to take six to 10 weeks to complete, although this will obviously depend on daily progress on the site,” said detective superintendent Katie Elliott.
“Teams of specialist search trained police officers from both Suffolk and Norfolk will be carrying out the work to find anything that may be linked to the investigation.”
She said while the search “may not provide answers” as to what happened to the airman, it was something that needed to be carried out as part of the investigation.
“In planning the search we have taken into account not only the need to find Corrie, but also factors including the noise, odour and disruption implications for local residents and site workers, and the safety and welfare of the officers who will undertake the search,” Det Supt Elliott added.
“We know that physically searching the site has the potential to cause an increase in odour and we have taken steps to reduce this as much as possible. We hope residents will understand that we and the site owners have taken all these things into consideration when making a decision to go ahead with the search. However we also hope they will also understand why we are doing this as part of our ongoing enquiries to find Corrie.”
The search was originally scheduled to begin on February 22, however the work at moving 8,000 tonnes of material from the site to allow better access for search teams has taken longer than expected.
Since Corrie vanished, according to police, officers have prioritised the most likely scenarios as to what happened to him as they worked through a list of possibilities.
“One of these lines of enquiry has been in respect of waste collections from the area, known as the horseshoe, around the time of the last sighting of Corrie,” said a spokeswoman.
Corrie was last seen turning right from Brentgovel Street into a horseshoe-shaped area full of waste bins used by a number of businesses.
The spokeswoman added: “It was known, and CCTV shows, that a waste lorry made a collection in the area a short time after the last confirmed sighting of Corrie and the lorry was seized in the early stages of the enquiry for forensic examination. This did not reveal any traces of him, however the waste collection has been one line of enquiry police have persisted with and kept under constant review.”
The area of the landfill site where waste collected from Bury St Edmunds that morning was deposited has not had further items put onto it since police alerted the site, early in the investigation, to the possibility that it may need to be searched.
Anyone with information about his disappearance is asked to call the incident room at Suffolk Police on 01473 782019.
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