Paedophile To Be Sentenced

9 March 2012, 08:59 | Updated: 30 March 2016, 13:50

A paedophile who snatched little girls from the streets of Newcastle in the 1980s and 90s, sexually abused and then dumped them is due to be sentenced.

David Bryant, 65, of Ulverston, Cumbria, has admitted a string of offences relating to four separate incidents in Hampshire and Tyneside.

He snatched a girl of five in broad daylight from near her Newcastle home in the mid 1990s. The child was found by a taxi driver three hours later wandering on the outskirts of Darlington.

A strikingly similar ordeal befell a four-year-old four months later when she was taken from near her home in the city's west end and was only found the next day after she knocked on a door in Darlington.

Bryant had already got away with abducting and indecently assaulting a five-year-old girl in Hampshire in the early 1980s and a three-year-old girl in Southampton the following year.

Bryant will be sentenced at Newcastle Crown Court where he pleaded guilty to four counts of kidnap and four counts of indecent assault in January.

Officers from Northumbria and Hampshire worked on the case and arrested Bryant last year following a DNA breakthrough.

After he admitted the charges, Detective Chief Inspector Steve Binks said:
"Bryant has pleaded guilty to offences which he committed in Hampshire in the 1980s and in the Northumbria area in the 1990s.

I want to thank the families and victims for their support and strength through this traumatic and timely ordeal.

We do continue to investigate these cases and with advances in science and technology we are able to bring justice for the victims, even with historic cases such as this one."