The BBC's Stephen Cape: "All the victims have been informed"

Recent advances in DNA profiling have allowed officers in Northamptonshire to link a series of rapes in the county to other attacks, in Warwickshire and the Thames Valley.

The man was arrested on Wednesday night.

Operation Quicksilver was launched in April to re-investigate rapes across the Midlands between July 1984 and July 1990.

The first attack happened in Northampton.

He assaulted four other women, including a factory worker and a young mother, between 1985 and 1987.

After a two-year gap he struck again in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, in May 1989, then in Reading, Berkshire, and Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, in 1990.

Two of the women contracted a venereal disease as a result of their ordeals, and another became pregnant and underwent a termination.

The link between the cases came to light in 1997 when the Forensic Science Service made an important breakthrough in the method of abstracting DNA.

Police renewed their appeals for information and received more than 700 fresh calls and carried out DNA screening tests.

The suspect was detained at an address in the Kingsley area of Northampton and taken to the town's Campbell Square police station for questioning, said a police spokeswoman.

"The arrest was made as a result of the ongoing police investigation and he will be interviewed in due course," said the Northants police spokeswoman.