A 34-year-old thug who launched an unprovoked road rage attack on a driver has been jailed by a crown court judge for 12 months.

Lee Sullivan punched Stephen Melloy several times as he sat in his van, leaving him with tinnitus in his ears.

Sullivan denied being the man who carried out the assault, but a judge at Maidstone Crown Court said he had been convicted on strong evidence.

He told the welder, of All Saints Road, Sittingbourne, that there had to be a prison sentence as his behaviour was not acceptable in a civilised society.

Mr Melloy said he was driving up Snipeshill at Sittingbourne towards Bapchild on August 27, 2004 on his way home from work when he stopped for a car in front of him to reverse into a parking space.

The traffic had stopped quickly, so he was close to the car parking. The woman driver looked round at him.

"There was a fellow beside her in the passenger seat," Mr Melloy told the court. "He turned round and sort of waved his hand at me. I didn’t take a lot of notice.

"He just jumped out of the car, came round the front of my van and bashed the windscreen with his fist. Then he came to the driver’s side, grabbed my head and started hitting me I don’t know how many times."

His attacker grabbed the car keys and threw them into the road.

Mr Melloy said he was left dazed. He saw a woman at the side of the road who said she had taken the car registration number.

"If I had been shouting at him, or whatever, I would have accepted what he did, but I didn’t do a thing," said the victim.

He added that he did not think the tinnitus would ever go away.

When arrested on September 21, Sullivan said the car belonged to the mother of his girlfriend Gemma Walsh. He said he would have been at work in Sheppey at the time of the incident.

But Mr Melloy picked Sullivan out of an identification procedure.

Sullivan said in evidence that Miss Walsh was not driving at the time because she had injured her hand.

"My life is like Groundhog Day," he said. "I was not the man who assaulted him on the A2 on that day."

Mr Recorder Peter Wallis told Sullivan after he was convicted of assault causing actual bodily harm that a prison sentence was virtually inevitable for such an offence.

"By your plea, you forced him to re-live the horror of that day," he said. "It was an unprovoked attack and it was also, in the words of one witness, a frenzied attack."