The father of missing RAF man Corrie McKeague has praised the search team for getting onto “their hands and knees” as they continue to search for his son in a landfill site.
Making a second visit to the site in Milton with his wife, 48-year-old Martin issued a statement on Thursday to express his gratitude.
“We had the honour of meeting and shaking the hands of another five members of the police search team, who will be rotating into the existing team of eight men and women who are raking through the rubbish there and looking for my son,” he wrote.
Corrie, 23, from Fife, vanished on a night out with friends in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on September 24.
A bin lorry was seen on CCTV near Brentgovel Street in the town at around the time Corrie was last seen.
The vehicle then appeared to take a route which coincided with the movements of Corrie’s phone, speaking fears he somehow ended up in a bin that was then picked up by that lorry.
The area of the landfill site where the load was deposited has been under intense scrutiny for over a week, in a search that could last up to ten weeks.
The rubbish heap is reportedly up to eight metres deep, covering around 920 square metres of the dump near Cambridge.
Martin added: “These police officers are managing to sift through 80 tonnes of rubbish per day, sometimes on their hands and knees, to ensure no detail is missed.
“Make no mistake; this is a high-risk crime scene with 24-hour security around the site, which means you need a small specially-trained team to ensure no evidence is contaminated.
“For this reason, you couldn’t simply bring in a large gung-ho group with heavy machinery everywhere. This is a forensic search, like an excavation, to be treated delicately and with care.”
Insisting he would “do anything to be out there with them,” Martin went on to say: “This is not classed as a low-risk search, where you can bring in volunteers, and search areas where this is very little if any chance of finding Corrie there. Those tend to become like media spectacles with little or no value.
“What’s also important to remember is how the search has arrived at this point, in this wasteland.
“If it weren’t for the incredible efforts of the Suffolk police force and their persistence in going over and over the data - even as other serious lines of enquiry continued - the human error in the calculation of the weight of the bin that likely carried Corrie here may never have been found.”
His latter comments came after a 26-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice over the discrepancy in the lorry’s load weight.
The man, who is not the bin lorry driver, faces no further action.
So far, the six-month investigation has cost more than £300,000, and the search of the landfill site could cost more than £500,000 if it does run to ten weeks.
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