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Barry George, cleared of the murder of the television presenter Jill Dando, says he was stalking another woman on the day of the shooting.

George, 48, says he met a woman who accused him of stalking her and later gave evidence for the prosecution.

“I walked with her and, from her perspective, maybe it was uncertain attention. But she didn’t make that clear. It didn’t seem like she was telling me to go away. If she’d told me to leave I’d have done so straight away,” he said in an interview with today’s News of the World.

George insisted he had never heard of Dando until after her death and that articles about her found by police in his flat were in a hoard of old newspapers.

“I wasn’t aware I’d ever seen her before. If people saw me in Gowan Avenue, where she lived, before that day it was because my old doctor was there, not because I was stalking Jill.”

George also denied ever visiting an estate agent for information on the house Dando was selling or having any knowledge of firearms despite being a Territorial Army soldier. He explained the speck of gunfire residue found in his coat pocket said by police to match a spot found on Dando as either coming from a fireworks display the previous November or from contamination while the coat was in police possession.

George, acquitted after a retrial at the Old Bailey on Friday after spending eight years in jail, also denied intentionally pestering the 38 women he was filmed following in the weeks before his arrest.

“I don’t deny walking with these women but there was never any manhandling. I was just wanting to know if they wanted me to wash their cars.

“In the past I have made women feel uncomfortable but this is not how I’ve wanted them to feel. I have no animosity to women. I know I have done wrong in the past and if I could go back in time and change that I would. The attempted rape I did time for is one of those situations. I’m very remorseful for that. I am trying to move on in my life. I’m not a danger to women any more” he told the newspaper.

Dando, 37, was shot dead on the doorstep of her home in Fulham, west London, on April 26, 1999.

The prosecution, estimated to have cost £4m, went ahead despite serious doubts there was enough evidence to convict, senior detectives admitted yesterday.

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