A 41-year-old man has been jailed for four years three months at Bradford Crown Court after he pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting a child over a four-year period.

Ian Akers started the sex abuse when the girl was 12 in 1993 and continued until 1997 threatening her not to tell anyone.

Prosecutor Ian Shiels told the court the assaults only stopped when the girl took up kickboxing when she was older.

An investigation started in 2002 after a series of coincidences when another girl heard about the incidents and told a leader at a Sea Cadets group who called in the police.

Akers, of Essex Street, off Wakefield Road, Bradford, also admitted 20 charges of possessing indecent images of children on his computer which were discovered when his house was searched.

Jailing him, Judge Peter Benson said: "What happened was disgusting and shameful in the extreme.

"The shameful acts were accompanied by threats that you would strike her if she told anybody.

"She felt it necessary to teach herself some self-defence to discourage you from your activity.

"Only when she was old enough and strong enough did you desist. You must have made her life a misery." Barrister Richard Gioserano, for Akers, said in mitigation the defendant had pleaded guilty and spared the girl the trauma of going to court.

"If there is mitigation that is it. He has had the courage where many people do not," he said.

The judge also made an order that Akers should serve at least two-thirds of the sentence and an extra order that he should not be around any under 16-year-olds unsupervised, he should not stay overnight at a place where there were under 16-year-olds, and should not socialise where there were under 16-year-olds.

The court heard Akers had already agreed to go on the Sex Offenders' Register.