ANTI-PAEDOPHILE campaigners stepped up their street protests across the country last night - despite police calls for calm.

While growing evidence emerged of innocent families being driven out by riots, the suicide of a second paedophile suspect was blamed on parents' protests, which at times have escalated into violence.

Attention focused on the troubled Paulsgrove estate in Portsmouth, where crowds gathered outside the homes of alleged sex offenders for the seventh night.

Protestors said they did not condone violence, but would continue to target alleged sex offenders until their demands for all suspected child abusers to be moved from the estate, and for the Government to tag all sex offenders, were met.

Earlier, it emerged that four families have been forced from their homes by the riots, which left a policeman in hospital after a brick was thrown at him.

The first riot, last Thursday night, was triggered after the News of the World gave details of an alleged paedophile, living on the estate, in its now abandoned name-and-shame campaign.

Feelings have been running high since the death of eight-year-old Sarah Payne.

Fears the violence could be spreading grew after a series of incidents elsewhere.

About 60 people gathered outside a 73-year-old sex offender's home in Southway, Plymouth, and threw a lump of concrete through his window.

Two weeks ago a family had to be moved from their home in Plymouth after residents wrongly accused a man of being a paedophile.

Police were also investigating a suspicious fire at the home of a man, in Bingley, West Yorkshire, due to be sentenced this week for possessing indecent images of children. He was not at home at the time of the fire, at 2am on Tuesday.

North-East campaigners for a change in the law relating to the registration of sex offenders reiterated their frustration at what they say is inadequate legislation.

Hartlepool borough councillor Kevin Kelly helped found the Rosie Palmer Foundation to press for changes to the law after the Hartlepool three-year-old Rosie was sexually assaulted and murdered in 1994.

"It's a difficult dilemma," he said. "But one of things we were pressing Jack Straw to do was introduce a proper register."

He warned: "You are always going to run the risk that the less savoury elements of society will take the law into their own hands."

Father-of-three Barry Bates, who spent seven days in prison after defying the courts over a campaign to banish a 17-year-old convicted child abuser from his village in Hesleden, near Hartlepool, last night said he would do it again, if necessary.

He said: "It's time the law was changed and these people were named. If there was a national register it would clear things up and there wouldn't be mistakes with innocent people being targeted."

Meanwhile, a millionaire arrested for alleged sex offences against boys has been found dead. John Potter, 49, was found dead in his garage in Herne Bay, Kent, with shotgun wounds to his head.

Mr Potter's death came after claims by a solicitor that his client, James White, of Oldham, Greater Manchester, took an overdose after a vigilante attack on his home.

Last night, Robin Corbett, chairman of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, called for the News of the World to be prosecuted for the incitement of public order offences.

The paper has always stressed it does not condone vigilante action and said that its publication of paedophiles' details was intended to help parents protect their children.

l A second post-mortem examination of murdered schoolgirl Sarah Payne's body has been held in a bid to discover how she was killed.

Detectives investigating the abduction and murder of the eight-year-old have so far been unable to find a cause of death