Nuisance caller asks for remand

Ian Parry has been warned he faces a custodial sentence

A serial nuisance caller who told a boy he had abducted his mother has asked a judge to be kept in custody.

The abusive call was one of more than 100 made from public pay phones by Ian Parry, 48, from Bacup, Lancashire,

He was due to be sentenced at Burnley Crown Court but the case ran out of time. He will reappear on 9 October.

Parry, who admitted eight counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, asked to be remanded in custody and Judge Simon Newell agreed.

Surveillance operation

The 48-year-old pleaded guilty to the charges at a previous hearing in August when Judge Newell warned him that a custodial sentence was "inevitable".

He also asked for 97 other offences involving nuisance calls to be taken into consideration.

The court heard the call to the teenager was one of more than 100 calls Parry made from public phone boxes in Lancashire and Manchester in a year-long campaign.

He is said to have targeted people at random from the telephone book, or after reading about them in local newspaper articles.

Parry was caught in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in August 2007 following a joint surveillance operation between police and BT security.

The phone company described it as one of the worst cases of their kind that it had ever dealt with.