IT was to be the day that a couple came together as man and wife, a joyous occasion for the family where everyone played their part.
Yet instead of delivering the best man’s speech as his brother Eamonn’s wedding yesterday, Liam Colgan remains missing in Germany weeks after he disappeared during the stag weekend.
There was no celebration on Friday. Eamonn’s wedding to partner Susan Dolan has been now been postponed while the family mounts a desperate search for the 29-year-old, with few leads to go on.
More than 20 days later they cling to the hope that Liam is somewhere out there wandering lost and confused, still trying to find his way home.
They say his disappearance in the early hours of Saturday 10 February is totally out of character for the fun-loving and easygoing postman from Inverness, who was charged with organising the stag weekend’s festivities.
The trip began in high spirits. It was supposed to be the type of blow-out that any young man bidding farewell to his single years would have been proud of.
As best man, Liam prepared a fun-filled itinerary of activities, with a football match and a trip to a brewery on the cards for the 18 friends and family who made the trip to Hamburg from Scotland and beyond.
But first up was a visit to the notorious Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s pulsing centre of nightlife and home to its red-light district.
The area hosts streets full of nightclubs and bars, and has a fearsome reputation as one of Europe’s party zones.
It was a stag night in the full Scottish tradition, with beer, and food, and high-spirits as the group moved from bar to bar into the early hours of the morning, when they eventually ended up in the Veermaster pub in the Baumwall area, close to the River Elbe.
It was here that the friends had their last sighting of Liam, who slipped away at some point after 1am and was not seen by them since.
When Eamonn, 33, a police officer in Dundee, realised his brother was not at the nearby AO hostel later that morning, he immediately contacted police. There was no reason for his brother to go missing, and the group had plans for the day.
Yet he was not immediately taken seriously by his German counterparts – many people go missing in the Reeperbahn, which is home to strip clubs and brothels too, and most return after a couple of days.
Mr Colgan told BBC Radio Scotland yesterday: “I fully understand, being a police officer myself, that some people when reporting [someone missing], it’s not actually a missing person – this is something they do regularly..
“But this was completely out of character. He was in a place he didn’t know, he was drunk, there were freezing temperatures. There was a lot of these points we were trying to get across.”
While slow to start, the investigation picked up pace 11 days later when CCTV footage emerged showing a confused Liam being helped by a passerby at the G&J building in Baumwall after a fall about an hour after he left the bar.
The family were encouraged as he was heading away from the river and canals around the Reeperbahn, and there have also been reports that he passed a church in the St Pauli area, where sniffer dogs later deployed by the police picked up his scent.
His brother and friends returned to the city to post missing posters and hand out fliers, and even enlisted the help of Hamburg football team St Pauli FC to appeal to their fans during a match last month.
Yet contact with the police has slowly dried up, and now Eamonn says that all that is left is a waiting game as they hold on in hope for any news, with only the CCTV pictures as clues to where Liam went.
He said: “It made us feel better that we know where he was at that point. But at the same time, it was horrible, thinking ‘where have you gone what have you done?’ Mr Colgan added: “It doesn’t sit right with either me or my partner to have the wedding when Liam is not there. He was best man, and a huge part of the day.
“We do have to remain hopeful and confident that we will get him home and have a great wedding with him there.”
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