Suffolk police will reopen the search for Corrie McKeague, the missing RAF serviceman, after deciding that a landfill site that has already been examined for five months remained the most likely location of his body.
The 23-year-old was last seen walking through Bury St Edmunds in late September last year after a night out with friends. A bin lorry was seen on CCTV near Brentgovel Street around the time McKeague was last seen. It took a route that appeared to coincide with the movements of his mobile phone signal.
The bin lorry linked to McKeague’s disappearance was initially thought to have collected a 11kg load, but police said it was later found to be more than 100kg.
The initial search of a landfill site at Milton, Cambridgeshire, was called off after no evidence of his body was found. However, the Suffolk force said that after rechecking the available information, officers concluded the area was “still the location where there was the highest likelihood of finding Corrie”.
The resumed, extended search will concentrate on an area next to the site of the earlier search and could take six weeks.
McKeague, who was based at RAF Honington in Suffolk but came from Fife, was last seen on CCTV at 3.25am on 24 September 2016.
Det Supt Katie Elliott said: “Throughout this rigorous investigation we have remained committed to following all reasonable lines of inquiry in our endeavours to discover what has happened to Corrie.
“Confronted by the variances in the way waste can be deposited and through further investigation, we cannot discount the possibility Corrie may be elsewhere in cell 22. Therefore, we believe our decision to extend the search area is the correct one.”
Suffolk police have already spent more than £1m investigating the disappearance.
Announcing the new search, Elliott said: “We have spoken to Corrie’s mum and dad to explain our decision, and share in detail the reasons behind it.
“We will, of course, continue to work together with Corrie’s family as the inquiry progresses. We can only hope that over the coming weeks the resumption of the search brings the answers that we are all hoping for and especially, of course, for Nicola [Urquhart, McKeague’s mother] and [his father] Martin.”
McKeague’s girlfriend, April Oliver, announced in June that the missing serviceman had become a father with the birth of their daughter.
Last month, a year after the serviceman went missing, his mother led a group of about 30 people around the town centre in a bid to “jog someone’s memory”. New CCTV images of four men believed to have interacted with McKeague on the night he disappeared were also released in September.
