CONVICTED paedophile Alan Hopkinson was today jailed for life after admitting snatching two ten-year-old girls and holding them captive for four days.

Hopkinson, 45, from Eastbourne, grabbed them off the street and pushed them into the boot of his car.

The kidnap happened less than four years after Hopkinson was released from prison for a sex attack on a young girl.

The 45-year-old former Bank of England employee also pleaded guilty to a string of sex assaults on two other girls when he appeared at Lewes Crown Court today.

Prosecutor Sonia Woodley QC, described what she called "an horrific series of crimes."

Hopkinson had been jailed for seven years for kidnapping and indecently assaulting an 11-year-old girl in 1991.

After his release in 1995 he moved to a flat in Kingfisher Drive, Eastbourne.

It was there that he befriended two sisters, ten and 12, and began grooming them by giving them sweets and money and allowing them to play on his computer.

He sexually abused them once a week for months, and it was when police went to arrest him for these offences that they found two girls in his flat above Langney Shopping Centre.

He had kidnapped them four days earlier and had kept them prisoners in his flat.

Amassive police search had taken place for the girls, and members of the public had lent their support.

Miss Woodley said police interviews with the first two girls had shown how the victims were too frightened to tell of their ordeal any earlier because they had been threatened by Hopkinson. He had persuaded their mother to allow them to play in his flat by convincing her that he was married and had a young son of his own, all of which was untrue.

Hopkinson kept a diary and listed some of the times he sexually assaulted them both.

In April last year he took them swimming in the sea and later took them back to his flat where he insisted on bathing them both.

Police found the two kidnapped girls sitting together on a bed in the flat - having watched the massive search for them unfold on television.

Miss Woodley described how he had been asked the time by one of the girls as he walked to school, and had then grabbed them both and bundled them into the boot of his car.

He put his hand over their mouths to stop them screaming.

He stopped on the way to his parents' empty house and asked their names and addresses. He said he had been in prison and said he was going to get some money from someone before they would be released.

At his mother's home in Magpie Road, Eastbourne, he concealed one of the girls in a sports bag and took her inside.

He attacked the other girl in the car and then drove them both to his flat in Langney.

There he carried one of the girls to his flat and tied her hands and ankles with his mother's tights.

The other girls was too big for the bag so he placed a black plastic bag over her head and made her run upstairs, where he tied her with torn sheets.

He locked the door on them and told them there was an 18ft drop outside and they would break their legs if they tried to escape.

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