An 86-year-old sex offender who has abused girls and women for more than half a century has been jailed for three-and-a-half years.

Peter Kis grabbed a seven-year-old girl’s hands in the foyer of a church and rubbed them against himself during a Sunday service last July.

And though he denied it was him, a jury at Swindon Crown Court took just over an hour to convict him of the offence.

The pensioner used to take the collection at the town centre church when he carried out the assault on the young member of the congregation.

During the trial the court heard how the little girl was with her grandmother waiting for a bus in Swindon town centre when she saw Kis, and cowered away.

When she was asked what was wrong the girl told her relative about the assault by Kis a few weeks earlier

After the girl's grandmother, who recognised Kis from church, spoke to the priest the matter was reported to the police and he was arrested.

He said that while he attended services and handed round the collection plate he did not touch the girl, saying it must have been someone else.

But the jury, who had been told about some of his history, did not believe him and convicted him of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.

Jailing Kis, of Windmill Court, Uxbridge Road, Freshbrook, Judge Robert Pawson said “You are quite unable it seems to leave women and female children alone.

“Your criminal behaviour as far as the police national computer records it started in 1967 when you were dealt with for indecent assault on two girls and you were imprisoned for eight years.

“We don’t know the details and you advance you don’t recall them but bearing in mind the sentencing regime in 1967 I have not doubt that they were serious offences.

“What you did to the girl was at the bottom of the scale, notwithstanding that she was seven.

“What you did to that little girl has to be seen in the context of your preceding 50 years of sexual offending.”

Kis was first jailed in 1967 and then given a suspended sentence in1971 after he was convicted of gross indecency with a child.

He was put on three year community orders in 1994 for gross indecency and indecent assault and in 1999 for indecent exposure.

In 2010 he approached two young girls on a bus in Swindon and touched them inappropriately.

He then arranged to see them the next day to buy them clothes and was arrested at that meeting.

Four years later he groped a female member of staff in a supermarket, then pulled her hand towards his body, and in 2015 pawed a woman working in a chemist.