A court in Xiamen, a coastal city in east China's Fujian Province, has sentenced a man to death for raping and sexually assaulting girls aged between eight and 12.

The city's intermediate court heard 38-year-old Peng Deng, a migrant worker from Sichuan, raped five girls and sexually assaulted two others in Xiamen between August last year and June this year.

He lured the girls by promising to buy them snacks or wristwatches, and in some cases threatened to hurt them with a knife, the court said in a statement.

It said Peng left his victims with varying degrees of physical injuries, without going into details.

The man was arrested on July 19 in Fuzhou, the provincial capital.

(Xinhua News Agency November 27, 2007)