Corrie McKeague: Inquest Into RAF Gunner's Death To Open

An inquest into the death of Royal Air Force gunner Corrie McKeague is set to take place following an application at the request of his family.

The Chief Coroner for England and Wales has directed the Senior Coroner for Suffolk, the county where the RAF serviceman was last seen, to hold an inquest into his death – which there is reason to believe occurred on 24 September 2016.

A date for a short inquest opening hearing is yet to be finalised, but is expected to take place within the next two weeks, and a pre-inquest review hearing will then be held in early 2021.

The full inquest itself will follow later in the year.

Corrie McKeague, a serving member of the Royal Air Force, was stationed at RAF Honington at the time he went missing.

He was last seen after a night out in Bury St Edmunds in the early hours of 24 September 2016.

Extensive searches, including at a landfill site, failed to find his body and no trace of the airman has been found since his disappearance.

CCTV footage was released following his disappearance and ex-Special Forces investigators were hired to try to help locate Corrie McKeague before the case was handed over to cold case detectives in 2018.

In late August, human bones were found in a Suffolk river.

Corrie's mother Nicola Urquhart said police were unable to reassure her human remains found in bin bags in the river on 27 August were not her son's.

Suffolk Police said further tests were taking place on the bones, but a post-mortem examination was unable to provide any "form of identification or cause of death", and they had no further comment to make on whether the remains could be Corrie McKeague's.

Corrie's mother said: "What we're hoping for as a family, for, it's not really closure, we'll never get closure, but just our way of being able to deal with what's happened and know that we have done everything that we could.

"We accept that Corrie has died, that we're not going to find Corrie alive anywhere now, but it's knowing that we've done all we can to have found Corrie.

"The worst one might be that they come back and say 'well A, B and C could have been done but now it's too late, there's nothing that we can do' and then we're still left with no kind of answers whatsoever.

"We're kind of hoping for somewhere in between, that they'll come back, they'll say we do believe he's died, there's nothing to suggest that he is still alive, things could have been done but perhaps it's too late now or perhaps something could be still done, an area still searched, I don't know."