A SEX offender who hooked up with a 12-year-old boy from Bolton has been jailed for planning another liaison with a 'target child'.

Mark Jackson, 38, was jailed for 32 months in 2015 after he lured the 12-year-old, and a 16-year-old pal, to a Birmingham hotel.

Jackson picked out the younger victim on Facebook before they met up at the town's Morrison's store. He later arranged the hotel trip, where he took the two boys to watch a horror movie and paid for piercings, and alcohol and cigarettes for them.

The trip saw him try to grope the younger boy and cuddle his older friend. The boys were tracked down after they were reported missing.

Jackson was given a prison term for child abduction by a judge at Bolton Crown Court and made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order, restricting his contact with under-16s.

But Durham Crown Court heard how earlier this year Jackson contacted an online profile called 'Connor'. This was supposedly a 12-year-old boy from Carlisle but in reality a police decoy account.

Omar Ahmad, prosecuting, said Jackson gave 'Connor' a Skype Messenger address then conversed regularly with him, turning to intimate matters, asking if he wanted a boyfriend, adding fulsome descriptions of some of his previous sexual encounters.

The older man suggested what sexual activity they could perform together, sending him graphic images of himself.

He asked ‘Connor’, who was a decoy profile set up by police, if he could get away from his mother to visit him or suggested he could travel to Carlisle to meet him when his mother was away from home.

Jackson was later at work and a search of his home revealed a computer with a memory stick, which were seized. It was found to contain 32 indecent images of children, with boys aged as young as five,

Jackson, 38, of School Court, Broom Park, near Durham, admitted breaching the SHPO, attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child and three counts of making an indecent image of a child and was jailed for three years by Recorder Jonathan Sandiford.