A night club doorman who repeatedly slashed a man, almost disembowelling him, before hurling him from a window has failed to clear his name.

Mustapha Taal, 43, of York Road, Hove, was jailed for 12 years last June after being convicted at the Old Bailey of trying to murder Mustapha Sonko.

A judge at London's Court of Appeal yesterday told Taal he was lucky not to have been jailed for longer for the horrific attack.

The court heard Taal, a bouncer at the Volks Tavern in Brighton, had been hired to kill Mr Sonko for unknown reasons.

Taal went to Mr Sonko's home in Peckham, south London, with another man on July 9, 2000.

Taal stabbed Mr Sonko in the stomach as soon as he answered the front door.

The Old Bailey jury heard how Mr Sonko, gravely wounded, fled upstairs.

Taal chased after him, and continued slashing Mr Sonko in front of his terrified wife Corinne. The attack was so vicious, Mr Sonko's lung and liver were left exposed.

He was eventually thrown out of an upstairs window and crawled away before collapsing in a pool of blood in a telephone box.

In his appeal against the conviction, Taal claimed he had been wrongly picked out in an identity parade.

But Lord Justice Rix, sitting with Judge Geoffrey Rivlin and Sir Swinton Thomas, rejected the defence's submissions.

Judges also rejected other grounds of appeal, including a claim the jury should have been discharged after one went absent from the jury room during deliberations.

They were also unpersuaded by fresh evidence from another man which Taal's lawyers claimed showed someone else could have committed the attack.