A CONVICTED sex offender was jailed for six years today (Monday) after he tried to rape a primary school pupil and abused a young boy.

The boy later revealed that he had seen Robert Horne do "disgusting things" to the girl but said he had saved her by stopping him.

The girl, now aged 12, said the final attack on her was "really sore" at the time but she was too scared to say anything. She later told her mother that she had been subjected to abuse by Horne.

Horne, 53, had denied sexually assaulting and attempting to rape the girl, and sexually assaulting the boy, but was found guilty of both offences.

A judge told him at the High Court in Edinburgh: "You have been convicted by the jury of an abhorrent and depraved course of sexual abuse towards two children aged under 11, including attempted rape of one of them over a period of three or four years."

Lord Uist said: "You have all along denied your guilt and shown no remorse. You are completely undeserving of any mercy or leniency, and your crimes must be marked by a severe sentence."

The judge told Horne, formerly of Seggarsdean Crescent, Haddington, that he would be placed on the sex offenders' register indefinitely.

Lord Uist told jurors at the end of the trial that it had been "an extremely distasteful case".

Horne molested the girl from the age of seven, carried out sex acts on her and exposed her to pornography at addresses in East Lothian between April 2015 and January 2019.

He also abused the boy at houses in the area and got him to look at pornography, as well as making the child perform sex acts on him between April 2014 and January last year.

The court heard that Horne was previously jailed for three months in 1992 for earlier sexual offending.

Following the final attack on the girl, she went for a medical examination and was found to have an injury on her private parts.

Horne, a former cleaner and gardener, was overheard on a phone call to the boy victim asking him to "please forgive me".

Defence counsel Jennifer Bain said at the end of the trial that Horne was "under no illusions" that he would receive a significant custodial sentence.