A SUSPECTED sex attacker got a ‘beating’ off a Worcester ‘lad’ when the allegations came to light, a court heard.

Both alleged victims gave evidence from the witness box against Daniel Edwards at Worcester Crown Court yesterday, one declining her right to give evidence behind a screen.

The 28-year-old, previously of Langdale Drive, Warndon, Worcester denies two counts of assault by penetration and one of trespass with intent to commit a sexual offence.

Now an adult, the younger of the two complainants said she was aged 13 to 15 when Edwards sexually assaulted her as she gave him a ‘backie’ on a friend’s bike from Pizza Allegro in Cranham Drive, Warndon, Worcester, the attack itself taking place in a nearby alley on a day between 2008 and 2011.

The witness said she was dragged towards bushes by Edwards who told her he was going to have sex with her, leading her to fear she would be raped.

Cross-examined by Adam Western, for Edwards, the complainant was challenged about going to a shop just 15 minutes after the alleged assault.

She saw Edwards talking to an older girl en route but told Mr Western his line of questioning was ‘irrelevant.’

She said: “I went to the shop, yeah, so?

"That doesn’t mean he didn’t sexually assault me because I went and got a Lucozade.”

She added: “He put his hands down my trousers - it’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter what you say - that’s what happened.”

The witness said it had crossed her mind to warn the young woman about what Edwards had done but she chose not to, saying it was not her problem.

Speaking of the alleged attack, she said ‘I could have been raped in that alley’ and added: “I had a lucky escape.”

The woman, now in her 20s, decided to stay away from Edwards after the alleged assault, describing him as ‘obviously a weirdo’.

During the alleged assault she said she had told him in ‘a stern way’: “I don’t want your hands down my trousers.”

The complainant said it was police who came to her about the allegation because somebody else had told them what had happened to her, saying she had ‘just wanted to forget about it’. “The police knocked my door and asked me if all this happened and I said ‘yeah’,” she told the jury.

The witness also told the jury she had not wanted to go to the police and did not want to be here, ‘being questioned by you’ (Mr Western).

The woman described how she started staying in and would no longer go out in the dark after the alleged assault. She added: “I still don’t to this day.”

She accepted giving her mobile number to Edwards immediately after the assault but said she did so because she was scared and to give her the chance ‘to get away from that man and get out of that alley’.

Mr Western put it to her that the allegation was ‘all made up’ and that she and the other complainant were trying ‘to make trouble for him’. She answered ‘that’s a lie’ to both questions.

In a video interview the older complainant said she was asleep in bed when she woke up in her Warndon flat to the defendant curved around her, sexually assaulting her in the summer of 2013.

She described him as 'sneaking in' and taking his trousers off before groping her intimately. “I thought it was a bad dream,” she told a police officer.

The front door had been locked and Edwards must have climbed in through her kitchen window which she had left open, she said. She told the officer she didn’t think she was scared but added: “Being scared came later on.”

The woman, now in her 40s, told the officer she had been told there had been another incident involving Edwards and ‘he’s had a beating over it from another young lad’.

The jury was told on Monday that the younger alleged victim thought ‘good’ when she learned Edwards received two black eyes.

Declining a screen, the older complainant said she feared she was going to be ‘strangled’ and told the jury: “I can’t even look at him. If he could have said sorry all I would have said was ‘get yourself a bit of help’. If you can’t say sorry to someone you ain’t got a conscience.

The witness said she had previously told him she was ‘old enough to be a his mum’ when he made an advance towards her. Though she was ‘flattered’, she said Edwards was too young and ‘he didn’t seem manly’. The trial continues.