A SCHOOLGIRL told a court how she was taken on a terrifying five-hour car journey by a knife-wielding attacker.

The child was grabbed from the street, threatened, indecently assaulted and the man tried to rape her as he drove her through country lanes.

The attacker, the prosecution allege, is 49-year-old Antoni Imiela. He is said to have made one final act of defiance after officers visited his home at Appledore, near Ashford, for a DNA sample two days earlier.

In a recorded interview shown to the jury at Maidstone Crown Court the girl, who was aged 10 at the time of the attack in November 2002, told how she pleaded with the man not to hurt her.

Tearful and clearly distraught the day after the incident, she said: "I asked him to let me go. I was begging him. He said, 'You see this knife. If you beg anymore I'm going to have to use it.'

"I was so scared - he said he would kill me."

Mr Imiela is said to have kidnapped the girl as she walked along a Birmingham street just after 4pm. When she declined a lift in his car he pulled out a penknife and ordered her inside.

She said: "He seemed really nice (at the beginning), I didn't know if he was going to do anything to me or not. Then he sounded rough and I was about to cry."

The terrified girl was taken from her home city to Warwick and then on to Stratford along deserted country lanes, before being taken back to Birmingham after 9pm.

She described how her attacker stopped several times to kiss, indecently assault her or make her perform sex acts on him, again using the knife to threaten her.

He warned her: "I have got nothing to lose. You've got your family to lose."

At one point he dragged her from the passenger seat into the back of the car and repeatedly tried to rape her, but did not succeed.

She said: "I didn't want any of this. I would be begging for mercy - that's how much I didn't want to do it."

He remarked "pretend we are lovers" and ordered her to duck under the window when they passed a police station. "Pretend you're enjoying it," he told her. "You might get home a little earlier."

During her ordeal she was made to call him Tony, but he claimed this was not his real name. She was told to let her hair down because she looked pretty.

After making her clean herself with tissues and banana milkshake "to get his evidence off" the man dropped her off in a different part of Birmingham with £10 for a taxi. finger prints.

Mr Imiela, a married man, denies nine charges of rape, one of attempted rape, indecent assault and kidnap between November 2001 and November 2002.

His first attack is said to have been the rape of a 10-year-old girl on the Stanhope estate at Ashford.

The trial continues.