A PAEDOPHILE due for release from a five-year sentence for attacks on young boys has been jailed for a further four years.

Former lorry driver Alan Chater, 54, was jailed in 2001 after he was branded a danger to children by a Newcastle judge.

Chater was caught by an alert pupil who noted his registration number when he exposed himself outside a school in Gateshead.

Newcastle Crown Court heard how this led police to search his home in Dene View, Burnopfield, County Durham, where they found a camera containing a snapshot of himself engaging in a sex act with a young boy.

While on bail for these offences he travelled to Carlisle where he molested a young boy in a park.

At the time of the attacks, he already had previous convictions for indecent assaults on young boys and unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl.

Judge Esmond Faulks branded Chater a danger when he delivered the five-year sentence in 2001.

The former lorry driver was due to have been released in July, but the Northumbria Police Operation Phoenix team, which reinvestigates cold-case files using advanced DNA techniques, linked him to further attacks on children in South Tyneside and Sunderland.

Chater, who initially denied the new offences, pleaded guilty to three charges of indecent assault and one of gross indecency with a child.

The first indecent assaults, in Castletown Dene in Sunderland on January 14, 1996, were on a boy aged eight and a girl, aged 11.

They were confronted by Chater, who was armed with a knife, and told to take their clothes off before they were indecently assaulted.

The next attack, of indecency with a child, happened on April 19, 2000, in Hebburn, South Tyneside, where he forced a ten-year-old boy to commit a sex act with him, while a younger boy was ordered to watch.

The last attack, on August 20, 2000, involved a boy aged 14 who was indecently assaulted in Jarrow, South Tyneside.

Further similar charges were dropped after the guilty pleas were entered.

At Newcastle Crown Court yesterday, John Evans, defending, said Chater had been receiving treatment and counselling in prison and was beginning to come to terms with his sickening past.

He asked that Chater be released to a hostel to continue his counselling. But Judge John Milford ordered that the sex offender serve a further four years in prison, whereafter he would be released on licence for five years.

He said: "You have a bad record and can be described as a persistent sexual predator with a specific interest in children. It is thought you present a very high risk of further sexual offending.

"I am afraid these further offences are far to serious to warrant anything other than a further period of custody."

He imposed a ten-year sexual offences prevention order banning Chater, however humanly possible, from any contact with children.