TWO teenage girls sparked a major police probe when they pretended that they had been abducted and held against their will after hours in a city bar.

Alice Nicol and Cathryn Spencer's lies tied up the whole of Central Scotland's CID for an entire shift, a court was told.

Two men were arrested and held for several hours in police cells, the bar was forensically searched, and hours of police time was wasted - all because the girls falsely claimed that that they had been walking past the pub, Claymores in Stirling, on their way back from a nearby nightclub when Cathryn, then 18, "got dragged in by some guy".

Stirling Sheriff Court heard that, in truth, Alice, then 19, Cathryn, then 18, together with a third girl, were given refuge in the pub on a cold winter's night because barman Declan Dufficy, 27, son of the then licensee of Claymores, thought they were too drunk to be out on the streets and there was a shortage of taxis.

The two girls were seen on CCTV "laughing and joking" outside the closed pub with Mr Dufficy and his friend, Alistair McEwan, a 29-year-old chef, before going in with them.

Depute fiscal Laura Knox said it was a matter of agreement between prosecution and defence that "all five of them went into the pub willingly together" in the early hours of December 27 last year.

However, at around 6am, Spencer phoned the police from the ladies' toilets in Claymores, on Stirling's Baker Street, and claimed they had been deliberately locked in the loos.

Nicol said one of the two men had kicked the toilet door in and they had "run past" the two men, got part-way down internal stairs, but had somehow been stopped.

Officers rushed to the scene and led Nicol and Spencer out of the building - the third girl, who was not involved in the false claims, had left earlier - and arrested their two "abductors".

However, CCTV showed Nicol leaving the pub freely only six minutes before Spencer called police, chatting to the driver of a car in the street, and going back into the bar again.

Sheriff William Gilchrist, who presided over a brief trial in the case of Nicol, now 20, of Doune, Perthshire, and heard a guilty plea from Spencer, now 19, of Glenochil, Clackmannanshire, said both girls had given "very precise, incredibly detailed blow-by-blow" false accounts of their fictitious ordeal.

Both girls were accused of wasting police time.

Sheriff Gilchrist found Nicol, who had denied the offence, guilty, and deferred sentence on both girls for background reports.

He said that, according to a statement of agreed evidence, "the entire Criminal Investigation Department of the Forth Valley Division of Police Scotland was involved in the investigation of the allegations for their entire shift".

The probe involved four uniformed officers, six detective constables, one detective sergeant, scenes of crime officers and two officers from the custody unit.

The pub itself was subjected to a detailed scenes-of-crime investigation.

Mr Dufficy, of Clackmannanshire, and Mr McEwan, from Fife, were each interviewed by a pair of detectives for up to 45 minutes apiece.

Sheriff Gilchrist said: "It was a huge waste of police resources, quite apart from the impact on those who were the object of the false allegations.

"In my view the appropriate sentence will be one where you pay something back to the community in view of the waste of resources that resulted from these false allegations."

Nicol, an office worker, said in evidence that she had begun the evening on Boxing Day night, 2015, with a visit to a pub in Causewayhead, Stirling, before going on with the third girl to the city's Dusk nightclub where they had met Spencer and the two men who were later arrested as a result of their false allegations. They stayed till closing time then went to the Claymores, which was not open to the public at that point.

She said she'd had "between 10 and 15 rums" and claimed her allegations were the result of being "a wee bit drunk and having difficulty processing everything that was happening".

She said in evidence: "Cathryn thought one of the guys was being a bit weird and she phoned the police and that's when everything started to go wrong. I don't think I actually said that we were abducted. I told the police it hadn't been a big deal for me."

Greg Cunningham, defence solicitor for Spencer, said his client, a mobile care officer, had also been very drunk.

He said: "She doesn't remember phoning the police at all, but offers no challenge to the evidence."

He added: "I don't offer any reasons or excuses on behalf of Miss Spencer, only apologies."

He said since the incident Spencer's family had been struck by tragedy - her brother Ross, 17, was killed in a car accident in Leicestershire in October, shortly after passing his driving test.

Declan Dufficy was in Ireland last Friday and unavailable for comment, but his father, also called Declan, whose lease on Claymores expired two-and-a-half months ago, said: "Declan went through awful hell on account of those two girls. That's what happens when you try to help people."

Nicol and Spencer were ordered to reappear in court for sentence on December 21.