The mum of missing airman Corrie McKeague claims police mistook CCTV footage of her son for a woman in a mini-skirt.
Nicola Urquhart says the unpublished shots prove he walked out alive from the area where he was last seen.
She was shown the footage by cold-case cops who were focusing on a vehicle in the grainy film.
And she is convinced it shows Corrie walking away from the bins which officers believe he climbed into before they were emptied into the back of a refuse lorry.
Police insist the person captured leaving the area, alongside two others, was a woman in a mini-skirt.
Nicola said: “On one of my last meetings with the police, they were showing us the CCTV.
“After we’d finished watching, it carried on playing as we talked.
“Then we saw someone walking out with these other people. Immediately I said, ‘That’s Corrie’. Corrie’s brothers, Darroch and Makeyan, were the same.
“The police said, ‘Yes, we thought it was Corrie too, we got experts in and it’s actually the girl… because she’s got a mini-skirt on and she’s got bare legs, it looks like light-coloured trousers’.
“But I said the description [of a girl] was put out, I’ve seen CCTV [of her], she was in dark jeans. That’s not a girl, that absolutely is Corrie.” The 23-year-old gunner, based at RAF Honington, was last seen on a night out in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in September 2016.
Police believe he died after drunkenly climbing into a Greggs bin which was then emptied into a lorry. But a search of the rubbish dump it went to in Milton, Cambs, found no trace of him.
Nicola, 51, said: “This footage was after the lorry had gone and I’m like, ‘That was Corrie leaving’. I do believe it was Corrie. Nobody came in wearing a mini-skirt.”
Nicola, a police officer from Dunfermline, Fife, says she accepts Corrie is dead – but believes the police’s theory is wrong.
The £2million investigation was shelved in 2018 and Nicola is now pinning her hopes on an inquest next year.
She said: “Now this is a cold case I’m able to say these things, I don’t fear hampering a police investigation.
“They searched the landfill and found rubbish from the Greggs bin from that date but nothing of him.
“To me they’ve proved beyond doubt Corrie didn’t go in the bin. So something else happened. I believe he walked out and came to harm trying to get back up to base.”
Suffolk police said a review by the East Midlands Special Operations Unit concluded the investigation had been “thorough and detailed, and explored all reasonable lines of enquiry”.
They added: “The integrity of the investigation has not been in question.”
