A CABBIE was tricked into driving three teenagers from Blackpool to Darwen after they told him they were stranded.

Father-of-two Alan Ramsey, 54, said he would have been unable to sleep had he left the girls in Blackpool.

The girls, aged about 13, fled his taxi without paying after arriving back home. Alan had even bought them a fried chicken meal after they said they were hungry.

He said: "Without sounding too melodramatic, you just think Holly and Jessica.

"If I had left them and then read that three girls had gone missing I wouldn't have forgiven myself. "They seemed genuine. I didn't think 13 year-old girls were as clever as that. It makes me sick to think they planned it all along."

Alan, a Blackpool black cab driver, was waiting for another pickup when he spotted the girls soaking wet outside the Pleasure Beach at 7.30pm.

One of them said they had no money but asked if he could take them to Darwen. Even though it was not company policy, Alan took pity and said he would.

The girl told him her parents would pay the £40 fee when they returned. They said their school was closed due to a gas scare, but Alan now thinks they were truants.

He said: "They went in through the front door of a group of flats and I waited for five or ten minutes," said Alan.

"Then I knocked on the door and one guy answered and said only three people lived in the flats and that he didn't know of the girls."

"They must have gone in through the front door and run off out through the back. I could not believe they had done that."

The matter has been reported to Darwen police.