A man was jailed yesterday for slashing a stranger's face in a pub for a dare to win £30.

Lee Mulcahy, 27, had been showing a knife around at a karaoke night at the Park Hotel, in Hartlepool, before he was goaded into using it by his brother, said Jamie Hill, prosecuting.

Mulcahy claimed that a man in the bar was a paedophile who had just been released from prison, which was untrue.

His innocent victim Gavin Warren, also 27, needed 35 stitches in his face, internally and externally, Teesside Crown Court heard.

Mulcahy, his brother and two women then went to his home where they agreed a story that the victim had attacked him earlier.

Mulcahy took a kitchen knife and slashed his own face and his chest, but when he was arrested a police surgeon identified them as self-inflicted.

Robin Denny, defending, said: "It does appear that his brother's imput to the events of that night was scarcely helpful, but the fact is that he did the deed."

Mr Denny added that Mulcahy saw his victim in a Hartlepool club over New Year and he apologised to him.

Judge John Walford told Mulcahy: "It was a piece of sickening violence, quite unprovoked in public with a knife."

Mulcahy, of Eton Street, Hartlepool, was jailed for three years and nine months after he pleaded guilty to wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm on November 1 last year.