Priest served in East Sussex

Michael Hill, 68, pleaded guilty to six charges of indecent assault on three boys aged between 10 and 14. The charges spanned the years between 1969 and 1987. He was jailed for five years.

Hill, who was assistant priest at St Catherine's Church in Heathfield from 1981 to 1983, earlier served three years of a five year sentence, handed down in 1997, for molesting eight boys. A number of these assaults were carried out in Heathfield.

He was rearrested when three new victims came forward and told how he had preyed on them over an 18-year period.

A spokesman for the Catholic church in England and Wales said: 'Michael Hill is going to be punished rightly so for the terrible crimes he committed. He is never going to work as a priest again he is going to be kicked out of the priesthood. He won't be a member of the clergy again.

'We now have very good child protection procedures in place which are well on the road to being fully implemented. We must try to ensure that these terrible kind of things don't happen again. We can't change the past but we desperately want to move forward and make sure that priests can be trusted. The vast majority of them can.'