December 2007 Child abuser jailed for groping A serial sex offender who groped a seven-year-old girl during a fireworks display while he was out of prison on licence has been jailed for 15 months. Gordon Rees, 40, was spotted touching the child at the event in Cardiff Bay in July. Other members of the crowd saw what he was doing and called security officers. Rees was found guilty of sexual assault at an earlier hearing. Jailing him, a judge at Newport Crown Court said he was a man who “preyed upon children”. The court heard how Rees had a previous conviction for gross indecency on an 11-year-old girl in 2002. For that offence, he was jailed for three years but was released on a 10-year extended licence. Rees had been free for three-and-a-half years when he reoffended at the fireworks display in Cardiff earlier this year. Judge Dafydd Hughes told him: “There is no doubt you are a man who has preyed upon young children on a regular basis”. Rees has previous offences dating back to 1983 when he was aged 16. May 2002 Paedophile jailed for sex abuse on girl, 7 A PAEDOPHILE who was trapped by a mum after he abused her daughter in Cardiff Market has been jailed. Gordon Rees, 34, was said by a psychiatrist to be a risk not only to children but to women too “for the foreseeable future”. He was arrested in October after a mother saw him lift up her seven year-old daughter’s clothing as she played on a children’s ride in the market. “He was crouching down and peering up her skirt,” prosecutor Nicholas Gareth Jones told Cardiff Crown Court yesterday, when Rees returned for sentence a month after admitting a charge of indecency with a child. The shocked and frightened mother was praised by police after she kept her head and trailed him from the market to a nearby shop, calling for help on her mobile phone. She even kept him talking until officers could arrive to arrest him. What she did not know was that Rees had been a sex offender since the age of 13 and had only been released from prison five weeks earlier. Handing down a 10-year extended sentence, Judge John Griffith Williams QC told him: “In the last 20 years you have made court appearances for a variety of sexual offending. “You have been given jail terms of between two and six years. “A psychiatrist says these have made no impact on your behaviour. “I am satisfied there is a risk you will commit sex offences in the future which will result in serious psychological harm to your victims.” The judge ordered Rees, who at the time of the offence lived in Cathedral Road, Cardiff, to serve 17 months of a previous sentence for indecently assaulting an 11-year-old girl after following her through Newport, from which he had been released on licence. After that he will remain behind bars for another three years and will be on licence again and subject to recall until 2013. He is already on the sex offenders’ register for life and the judge made a lifetime order banning him from working with children. Pictures of little girls, half-undressed and in some cases naked, cut from magazines and travel brochures and found at his home, will be destroyed.