Michael Donovan was charged with abducting his own daughter 15 months before he allegedly kidnapped Shannon Matthews and held her captive in his flat, a court heard today.

He took his 11-year-old elder daughter - who was in the care of social services - from outside her school, drove her to stay at the seaside and booked into a guest house under a false name and address.

A jury at Leeds Crown Court was told that Mr Donovan, 40, was arrested and accused of abduction after the trip to Blackpool in November 2006, but the charge was dropped when the case came to court last year.

In February this year, he is said to have snatched Shannon as the nine-year-old walked home from school before holding her for 24 days, drugged and tethered at his flat a mile from her home in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

Under cross-examination, Mr Donovan, who began giving evidence today, denied that he had previously used a hiding place in the base of a bed, where Shannon was eventually found by police, to hide other children.

He said that he had been forced to take Shannon as part of a fake kidnap plot orchestrated by her mother, Karen Matthews, 33, who thought she could earn a £50,000 reward for her daughter's safe return.

He was scared of Ms Matthews, he said, and agreed to do what she wanted after she threatened to set "three lads" on him. If he refused, they would "come and do my car in, do my flat in and do me in".

The slightly-built defendant, who was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt, had an operation last weekend on a fractured jaw, an injury caused when he was beaten up by another prisoner at Armley jail, in Leeds, shortly after the trial began two weeks ago.

He spoke from the witness box in a voice which barely rose above a whisper and was frequently asked to speak more loudly because members of the jury were unable to hear him.

Mr Donovan told the court that he was educated at a special school because he had "all sorts of difficulties" in reading, writing and "trying to understand things in life".

Bullied, he left school at 16 and worked in a tailoring factory before finding work as a delivery driver. He met his future wife while both were receiving psychiatric treatment. They had two children and married even though she was "violent and controlling".

The relationship eventually broke down and the couple divorced. For a while, both girls lived with their father but they were later taken into care, which made him very "upset and unhappy".

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