THE RAF will hold a memorial service in honour of Dunfermline airman Corrie McKeague.

A special stone will also be erected at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire and give his four-year-old daughter Ellie, who he never met, "somewhere to go to remember him as she gets older".

Corrie was 23 when he went missing after a night out in Bury St Edmunds in September 2016.

He was never seen again and a coroner's inquest in March concluded that he died after climbing into a Biffa waste bin that was tipped into a bin lorry and taken to landfill.

His mum, Nicola Urquhart, who was travelling south this week to collect his belongings and arrange her son's funeral, said the memorial will be held at his base, RAF Honington, in Suffolk.

She said: "It was the proudest thing Corrie ever achieved in his life so we would like it to be there and the RAF have agreed to that.

"We will also be getting a memorial stone from the RAF that they will be placing at the national arboretum in the regiment's area.

"That's something that fills us with immense pride, that Corrie is being recognised as a serving airman and that they will be putting up a plaque up for him."

Corrie's girlfriend, April Oliver, gave birth to Ellie in June 2017, nine months after he went missing.

Nicola said: "His daughter, who is probably one of the most important people in all of this, his little girl is going to be able to meet some people to talk about her dad, family, friends, his colleagues, and she will be able to go somewhere to remember him as she gets older."

She gave the update in a video on Facebook, on the Find Corrie page that has more than 100,000 members and was set up in the wake of his disappearance.

Nicola also explained why the family had now accepted the conclusions of the inquest, which seemed the "most plausible" explanation after all the evidence was heard in court.

She said a lot of that information had not been known to the family until the inquest and that, after outlining to the police how they felt they'd been let down, they received a "genuine and heartfelt apology" from the two senior investigating officers.

Nicola, who is a sergeant with Police Scotland, said: "There were mistakes made, things could have been done differently, but it happened and there's no point getting upset about it.

"Corrie loved his life, he lived every second of his life to the absolute maximum.

"I wouldn't insult him by becoming bitter, angry and twisted and going over everything that's happened.

"That's no way to live a life so we will draw a line under this and move on."

Nicola said she had "made my peace" with the Suffolk and Norfolk team who investigated her son's disappearance: "The apology is enough for me.

"I accept I was a nightmare for them but this was my son and I was going to fight for everything that I could to get every answer that I could."

She added: "And because I had the support of all of you on here, over 100,000 people, I had a loud, loud voice."

Nicola said that "hindsight is a wonderful thing" and does not blame the police for discounting initially the theory that Corrie climbed into the bin.

She said they were misled after being told the bin's contents weighed 11 kilogrammes, which would have ruled out Corrie being in there, and only later the actual weight was found to be 116kg.

It meant searches of the Milton landfill site in Cambridgeshire, where the bin lorry had deposited its load, were not carried out until later and no trace of him was found.

She said forensic examinations of the bin and inside of the lorry were also carried out much later than they were first told, meaning any chance of finding evidence was reduced greatly.

Nicola said: "One of the things I was clinging to, when I was saying there was no way Corrie went into that bin, was that the police had proved to me he didn't go in that bin as there was no DNA, fingerprints or blood on the bin.

"That's because I was under the assumption forensic examination was carried out within days of Corrie going missing. And it hadn't.

"So finding that out, that does logically change everything."

She said: "From all the information we heard in court, we do align ourselves with the police and what they've said is the most likely hypothesis: that Corrie has ended up in a Biffa bin and in the landfill process somewhere.

"But, and I have to be careful what I say, my biggest problem and the reasons I believe I will never get an answer to this is Biffa."