Corrie McKeague went missing in September and police now believe he may have fallen into a bin

The heartbroken mother of missing airman Corrie McKeague has said new evidence suggesting that he may have been crushed in the back of a bin lorry 'can only mean one thing'.

She wrote online after it emerged that a bin lorry which collected rubbish from where the 23-year-old was last seen picked up an extra 184 pounds in weight than previously thought - almost the same as that of 14-stone Corrie.

A blunder by the collection firm meant that it was initially thought that the vehicle transported just 24 pounds of rubbish.

But analysis of system inside the lorry which calculates the weight of its load shows it was carrying something that significantly raised the weight.

It raises the possibility that the RAF gunner may have crawled or fallen into the bin after a night out and had been dumped in the crusher of the bin lorry.

Corrie's mother Nicola Urquhart, 48, from Dunfermline, Fife, said she accepted that her son was dead and on a landfill site which is being searched by police.

She wrote on her Find Corrie Facebook page: 'With the weight of the bin that was lifted the night Corrie went missing has been incorrect and the true weight is over 100kg. This can really devastatingly only mean one thing.'

It came as Corrie's father Martin McKeague and his wife Trisha joined the painstaking search at the rubbish dump where it is thought the airman's body may be.

Corrie's father Martin McKeague and his wife Trisha joined the search for the body at a landfill site in Cambridgeshire

Martin McKeague, the father of missing Corrie, pictured above right, embraces his partner Trisha, pictured above left, while joining police at a rubbish dump in Cambridgeshire

Trisha, pictured above left, shed a tear as she held hands with her partner Martin at the waste disposal site

The bin company Biffa had previously told police that their lorry had picked up only 11kgs of waste from the bin containing rubbish from a Greggs takeaway.

Police said the wrong information appeared to have been given at the start of the inquiry in good faith and was a genuine mistake.

The information was released as police searched through 8,000 tons of rubbish for Corrie's body at a landfill site in Milton, Cambridgeshire.

Ms Urquhart wrote on Facebook: 'I can only pray that Corrie is found quickly and that we are able to get answers as to how this could have happened.

'Please can I ask everyone on here to try really hard not to speculate just now. Each second waiting to find Corrie is torture enough. This page was set up to find corrie. We still need to do this.

'From myself, makeyan and darroch thank you for your never ending support more than ever. X x x'

Specialist search teams are scouring an enormous landfill site, pictured above, as they search for the body of missing RAF gunner Corrie McKeague

Trained police officers are looking through 8,000 tonnes of bulk material in Milton, Cambridgeshire, pictured above

Corrie who was based at RAF Honington, Suffolk, was last seen on CCTV on a drunken night out at 3.25am on September 24 last year as he walked into the refuse collection area in Bury St Edmunds.

Police quickly realised that the movement of his mobile phone signal matched that of the bin lorry which had picked up the contents of the Greggs wheelie bin in the early hours of September 24.

The signal from the phone stopped at around the time the lorry reached the Barton Mills area about 14 miles away, possibly when it picked up more rubbish.

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, although some cameras were swivelling through different positions, suggesting he might have been missed.

The search of the landfill in Cambridgeshire, pictured above, could take up to ten weeks with 920 square metres of rubbish to sift through

'This can really devastatingly only mean one thing': Corrie McKeague mum's Facebook post in full Advertisement

Haydn Stephens, pictured, 26, was arrested by police as part of the investigation into the disappearance of Corrie McKeague but it was later revealed that no further action would be taken against him

Officers concentrated on theories that Corrie may have been abducted or come to harm while trying to walk back to his base in a drunken state and launched a huge search for him.

Last night a Suffolk Police spokeswoman said that Biffa had given the wrong information about the weight of the rubbish in the bin due to staff being confused by the collection data.

She said that the company charged customers for each collection, regardless of the weight of rubbish collected, meaning that they had not been familiar with analysing the individual weight of collections.

The blunder was uncovered when the information was checked and led directly to the arrest of a 26-year-old man who was named as Haydn Stephens, a special constable who works as a dispatcher for Biffa.

The spokeswoman confirmed that the arrested man who was released on police bail after being quizzed last week had now been told he faced no further action.

Police have released CCTV of two people in the area at the time of Mr McKeague's disappearance

She said: 'Police have been carrying out extensive work to check and re-check data provided to officers.

'The investigation has identified that the company who provided the data usually charge per collection, not per weight of load collected, and it appears that it was genuinely believed by the company that the data provided was correct.

'There was no intention to mislead the investigation, however our discovery, through persisting with this through our enquiries and evidence gathering, now puts a new emphasis on the search.

'Corrie's family have been made aware of this new information and we continue to liaise with them as we move forward.

'Our extensive work around CCTV to see if Corrie could have left the Brentgovel Street area and the vast number of other enquiries we have been making have been crucial to getting us to this point.

'We have had to be methodical and systematic in our approach to ensure we were not ruling out the line of enquiry that may give us the answers.

'The search of the landfill is a huge undertaking, and still may not provide the answer as to what happened, but now, with new information uncovered by the officers working on the case, this is the priority.

Mr McKeague and girlfriend April Oliver. His mother has said she thinks his body may be found

'We would like to thank all of those organisations who have been assisting with the investigation.

'Their assistance and co-operation throughout has allowed us to conduct the enquiries we needed to do and we are grateful that they have been supportive of our work.'

Mrs Urquhart has previously said there is a 'good possibility' her son's body will be found at the landfill site.

Speaking last month, she said: 'I think there's a good possibility that that's where he could have ended up, because I try to look at things logically.

'What we know is that he's not left on foot, he's not still in there now, so he's left in a vehicle. That means he could have gone in a bin and then in the bin lorry, or in one of the other vehicles that were there.

Mrs Urquhart added: 'I don't think anyone who has put Corrie there is going to come forward - they would have done it by now.

'But if someone knows how someone is behaving, if they are behaving oddly, we're going to find Corrie if he's in that landfill, so come forward now, so whoever has put him there doesn't get away with saying he's fallen in a bin and it's an accident.

'At least give us some more closure, not just finding Corrie, but also how he got there and what happened to him.'

Mr McKeague was last seen walking through Bury St Edmunds after a night out in September

Detectives have so far spent more than £300,000 in their search to find Mr McKeague, including using Cadaver dogs, trained to sniff out dead bodies.

The investigation is one of the most expensive ever carried out by Suffolk and Norfolk Constabularies.

Mr McKeague's family have also raised more than £50,000 to draft in private investigators to help and have organised three private searches in their desperate hunt for clues.

Since Corrie's disappearance, it has also emerged that his girlfriend April Oliver, 21, is pregnant with his child.

Miss Oliver said Corrie did not know about the baby which is due in late spring or early summer.

Corrie is originally from Fife in Scotland and moved down to Suffolk to live at RAF Honington where he worked as a gunner and team medic in the air force.

Anyone with information about his disappearance is asked to call the incident room at Suffolk Police on 01473 782019.