An 81-year-old former priest has been convicted of sex offences after being extradited back to the UK from Australia.

Five years after his victims came forward to police, Meirion Griffiths was convicted of historic offences against a teenage girl and an adult woman.

The offences took place in the 1970s and 1980s when he was a Church of England priest at St Pancras Church in the south coast town of Chichester, Sussex Police said.

Griffiths had emigrated to Western Australia in 1988, but despite putting over 10,000 miles between himself and his former parish, he was arrested on an extradition warrant in November 2017.

He was extradited to the UK in January 2019 and was convicted at Portsmouth Crown Court on Monday after a six-day retrial.

Griffiths, formerly of Maddington, Perth, was found guilty of two counts of indecent assault against the girl in the mid-1970s, one of them involving multiple occasions, and two counts of indecent assault against the woman, then in her mid-20s in 1982.

He was found not guilty of two counts of indecent assault, one against each of the women.

All the offences took place in Chichester or other nearby locations in West Sussex when he was working as a priest at St Pancras Church.

He was remanded in custody for sentencing on a date not yet set by the court.

Griffiths was, until his retirement in 2000, priest-in-charge at suburban Maddington.

He had been fighting extradition to his native UK for more than a year after being arrested by Perth police in late 2017.

Ordained into the Church of England in 1966, Reverend Griffiths served in various parishes across England and Wales before he moved to Australia in 1988.

He became assistant curate of Albany and rector of Collie before taking up the senior role at Maddington in the mid-1990s.

Police launched an investigation in 2014 and in December 2016 an extradition warrant was issued by Westminster Magistrate’s Court.

Mr Griffiths was arrested by Perth police in November 2017. He had fought his extradition.