A DELIVERY driver has been jailed for sexually assaulting a woman — despite claiming he did it in his sleep.

A jury failed to accept his claim that he had a condition called ‘sexsomnia’, which meant that he committed the attack while asleep.

Alan Walker is now starting a two-year jail sentence after he was convicted of sexual assault by penetration.

Recorder Nick Clarke, QC, said the case has been ‘difficult and sensitive’, and told the defendant he was being jailed.

He said: “It is clearly a very serious offence. Inevitably, for offences of this severity and gravity, a prison sentence will be imposed."

Walker, 47, of Nook Farm Avenue, Rochdale, attacked his victim, a mother in her 20s, at a house in Whitworth last January.

Both were staying over at the property and the woman had awoken to find Walker attacking her. She called the police and Walker was arrested and charged.

Walker, who has children, claimed he had sexsomnia and had been asleep at the time of the incident in January last year.

The hearing was told Walker, who had two jobs, had no previous convictions for sex offences.

Sexsomnia was first identified in 1996 and is a classified sleep disorder characterised as a "nonrapid-eye-movement parasomnia".

Last year lorry driver Ian Ball, 35, of Ormskirk, was cleared of sexual assault after experts who examined his history of sleepwalking concluded that he had not known what he was doing.