A FORMER college caretaker showed pornographic videos to young boys in a lecture theatre before raping them, one of his alleged victims told a court yesterday.

He said John James San-derson, 35, first took him and an older boy to the teaching centre in Northgate, Darlington, when he was about 14.

He and the other teenager ran around the building before going into a lecture room where Mr Sanderson put on the video.

The next time they visited the centre, he told a jury at Teesside Crown Court, Mr Sanderson got a brown bottle labelled "chloroform" from the cellar.

"John said he had some stuff to get us high," he said. The alleged victim, now 21, said he and the other boy put on white dust-masks, after which he experienced "a sweet taste and a throbbing head".

After that, he said, they would use chloroform "all the time" in different rooms at the centre. He said he did not resist taking it because it "took away" the fact that he was being raped.

He told the court he was also abused by the defendant in woods near the river in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, and in a derelict cattle shed at Middridge.

Earlier, defence barrister Graeme Gaston, cross examining the other alleged victim, now 22, suggested he had made up the accusations about Mr Sanderson.

"I was definitely abused by Mr Sanderson," he replied. "I know what's messed my life up. I wouldn't have come this far if I was making it up."

He told the jury he had cut his own arms because of the abuse. "The self harm would take away the pain inside," he said.

Mr Gaston pointed out that he claimed to have been about 17 or 18 when he was abused at the centre in Darlington, which would have been in about 1997.

"The position is that, in fact, Mr Sanderson had stopped working there in 1996, a year before that," he said.

"I'm not very good with my dates," replied the witness.

Mr Sanderson, formerly of Bishop Auckland, Escomb and Shildon, but who now lives in Newcastle, denies four charges of rape, three of serious sexual assault, indecency with a child and indecent assault between 1990 and May last year.

The case continues.