A SEX attacker who targeted two students from St Andrews University had carried out three similar attacks in Germany.

Award-winning Pasquale Galianni has admitted two street attacks at St Andrews campus at North Haugh, on November 28, 2013 and April 10, this year.

Judge Lord Burns has ordered a risk assessment of the danger the 31-year-old, who won the prestigious Cormack Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013, poses to women.

After pleading guilty at the High Court in Glasgow, it emerged that the astrophysics student has previously offended when he lived in Germany in 2006.

Advocate depute David Taylor, prosecuting, told the court: "The accused has no previous convictions in the United Kingdom, but has a conviction from the time he spent in Germany for an offence described as 'sexual coercion'."

The judge said: "There are three incidents in 2006 which mirror quite closely what happened on two occasions."

Galianni had originally denied the charges facing him in Scotland but changed his plea halfway through the trial. One of his victims, a 19-year-old student, had already told the court how she was grabbed, dragged into undergrowth and pinned to the ground by him as she walked towards her accommodation on campus on April 10 this year.

Sentence was deferred until next month at the High Court in Edinburgh.