A man suspected of carrying out violent sex attacks is to be questioned by detectives investigating the murder of a ten-year-old girl.

Geoffrey Nuttall, 44, was arrested in Staffordshire on Saturday about an attack on a mother in front of her young son and a sexual assault on a woman, both in North Wales, last month.

It has since been revealed that detectives investigating the murder of Lauren Pilkington-Smith, who was found dead in a patch of woodland close to her home in Leigh, Greater Manchester, also wish to speak to Nuttall.

Police sources claim Nuttall, who is from the Greater Manchester area, is one of a number of people who they wish to speak to in connection with the schoolgirl?s murder.

Last week, police in North Wales took the unusual step of naming Nuttall as a suspect in a violent attack on a 30-year-old woman at her home in Bethesda, in front of her four-year-old son.

A scruffy man called at the woman?s house on June 21 and asked for water for his car, which she gave him. He returned ten minutes later and tried to strangle her as her young son looked on. The attack was thought to be sexually motivated.

He is also being questioned about a sexual attack on a woman by a man posing as a male jogger two days later. Nuttall is thought to change his appearance regularly and is suspected of using props, such as a hat and binoculars, to pose as a hillwalker.

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police refused to confirm whether Nuttall was to be questioned by detectives investigating Lauren?s murder. A number of people are being traced in connection with her death.

Lauren?s body was found in woodland near the Leeds-Liverpool Canal in the early hours of Friday morning.

There were no obvious signs of injury to her body but police say she was killed in the open and her body then hidden in thick undergrowth.

The Manchester United fan vanished shortly after 7.30pm on Thursday after spending the evening playing with friends in a nearby park.

Her distraught family joined police in a desperate late-night search for the youngster.

Lauren?s grandfather Barry Smith spotted her body hidden in bushes at the end of Sanderson Street, only 200 yards from the family home on Twist Lane. Her parents Alison Pilkington-Smith, 35, and Glen Smith, 37, said the family, including her two sisters Rebecca, 15, and Ciara, two-and-a-half and brother Sam, aged four, had been devastated.