Yahoo News Police halt search after finding no sign of missing airman Corrie McKeague
Police hunting missing airman Corrie McKeague have admitted he may never be found after a £1.2 million search of a landfill site ended in failure.
Detectives said they still believed his body was at the site, but after 20 weeks of sifting through 6,500 tonnes of rubbish they had found no sign of the RAF gunner.
The officer leading the hunt for Mr McKeague, 23, stormed out of a press conference after saying the search of the site had been halted.
Detective Superintendent Katie Elliott of Suffolk Police got out of her chair and left the room after saying that everything possible had been done to find Mr McKeague.
Earlier she said she still believed that his body was buried somewhere under tons of rubbish at the giant 120 acre site in Milton, Cambridgeshire.
Ms Elliott said she had credible information from a witness that Corrie had previously gone to sleep in rubbish after a night out.
The RAF Regiment airman from Fife, Dunfermline, is thought to have been scooped up by a bin lorry when the bin was emptied in the early hours of September 24 last year.
Ms Elliott denied that the search of the site had been halted on grounds of cost after she admitted that the hunt had so far cost £1.2million.
She said that the search of the site had been carried out in an area where it had been identified that waste was dumped over the period Corrie went missing
But she said officers had now finished searching the area where rubbish was 26ft deep and had no further information about where they should be looking.
Ms Elliott added: "It is not a matter of cost. The investigation has never been about money.
"We searched the areas where we had information that the waste was deposited
Beyond that it is very difficult to establish where we would look for Corrie."
Ms Elliott said Corrie's family had been told the search of the tip was being called off.
She said: "I can only imagine it must be devastating, not to have found him.
"Our thoughts are with Corrie's family as we had hoped that this search would have provided them with the answers about what happened to him."
Corrie who was based at RAF Honington, Suffolk, was last seen on CCTV at 3.25am on September 24 as he walked into the refuse collection area in Bury St Edmunds.
The signal from the phone stopped at around the time the lorry reached the Barton Mills area about 14 miles away
The lorry was immediately impounded, but no forensic clues linking it to Corrie's disappearance were found.
No CCTV cameras captured images of the RAF Regiment soldier leaving the "horseshoe shaped" area on foot.
Bin lorry operator Biffa initially wrongly stated that records show the wheelie bin behind Greggs had only contained around 11kgs of waste.
Officers repeatedly asked for the calculation to be checked and Biffa finally admitted in March that it had made a mistake and the bin contained more than 100kgs - enough to include a body.
Suffolk Police have now commissioned a review of the investigation to see if anything further can be done to trace Corrie.
Ms Elliott said: "We remain open minded and should this review reveal further lines of enquiry that will help us find Corrie we will pursue them vigorously."
Corrie's policewoman mother Nicola Urquhart, a family liaison officer with Police Scotland, said earlier this week that she believed the hunt for him should continue.
She said: "I understand that Corrie may never be found. I am realistic and we will find a way to deal with that scenario but it would have to be knowing that a sound investigation had been carried out and there are no other lines of enquiry that could be followed. We are still a long way of that.
"Mistakes have been made, I try not to live in the past as I can't change what's already happened but it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to remain quiet."
