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RAF gunner Corrie McKeague is "no longer missing" according to his dad who claims he knows what happened to him.

The 23-year-old went missing in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk in September 2016 after a night out.

A huge man-hunt was launched but he was never found.

Suffolk Constabulary officially stood down the search for the young man in March, handing the investigation to a cold-case team, leaving his family with scores of unanswered questions.

His heart-broken father Martin McKeague has now taken to Facebook to claim his son, whose whereabouts that evening police last tracked to a route near a landfill site, is somewhere "in the Suffolk waste disposal system."

(Image: SWNS)

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CCTV from that evening in 2016 showed Corrie staggering into an industrial area known as the horseshoe at 3.25am where it is believed he crawled into a large recycling bin before being crushed to death by a refuse truck and taken to a landfill site 30 miles away.

His dad went on to say his son's remains are "essentially irretrievable".

Writing on social media, Martin said: "We do know what happened to Corrie and we have to accept that it is impossible to search those areas for him now.

(Image: Facebook) (Image: Facebook)

"And accepting that conclusion has clearly not been easy for the McKeague family in Scotland, nor anyone else.

"That’s why we feel Corrie is no longer missing, but rather his body is irretrievable because the remaining waste disposal environments are either too toxic to search, and the size of Cell 22 is so vast that it could take years to do so in order to find out exactly where he came to rest."

He continued: "And accepting that conclusion has clearly not been easy for the McKeague family in Scotland, nor anyone else.

"This has been an unbelievable and horrific journey of grieve and acceptance for the McKeague family and we want to thank you all again for standing up and standing by us."

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(Image: PA)

(Image: PA)

The McKeague family have had to deal with years of dead ends and false hope in their quest to get a definitive answer about what happened to Corrie.

Heartbreakingly, his girlfriend April Oliver was pregnant at the time of his disappearance.

She gave birth to baby Ellie-Louise some months later. Her middle name is Corrie in a touching tribute to her dad.

Personal trainer April met Corrie on a dating website five months before he disappeared on 24 September 2016.

In April Corrie's mum met with detectives to discuss the case.

Nicola Urquhart, 48, was said to be refusing to give up on finding her son and said she still had “a lot of questions that needed to be answered”.

She added: "Although I would have liked these answers over a year ago, I am still positive because at least I’m getting the information now."

In March police said there were "no realistic lines of inquiry left" in the case which cost £2.1 million to investigate.