A YOUNG family have been hounded out of their home after a hate campaign culminated in an arson attack.

Petrol was poured through the front door and set ablaze as a four-year-old boy slept upstairs in the late night attack.

Dene Roberts, 35, woke up at 2.30am at his home on Hewitson Crescent to find his bedroom full of smoke. The front door of the house was in flames and was filling the house with deadly fumes.

"I couldn't even see the door because the room was so full of thick black smoke," said Dene. "All I could think was that I had to get Cameron out."

Dene rushed into the four-year-old's bedroom and carried him downstairs and out of the back door to safety before returning to the burning door to tackle the fire.

"The door was flaming but I threw a couple of buckets of water over it and it went out," he said. "But I just kept thinking, 'What if?'

"The worrying thing is that the electric wiring and gas pipes run across the top of the front door. If they had all caught, and the meters which are next to it, who knows what would have happened?"

The fire service confirmed that petrol had been poured through the front door and lit by a bit of paper lodged in the letterbox.

Although no-one was hurt, the family have been forced to evacuate while repairs are carried on the smoke-damaged house. They are now crammed into a single room in a hostel as Christmas looms.

It is not the first time that the family have been targeted.

"It's like living in Bosnia," said Dene. "We don't know what's going to happen next. I have to burn the rubbish otherwise it gets thrown all over the garden - it's ridiculous."

Sue, 29, said: "We've had dog muck pushed through the letterbox. Cameron's bike was stolen and then run over."

"Dene has had his tyres slashed, and so have other people in the area.

"It's like a hate campaign that has been slowly burning away since I got here 18 months ago," said Sue. "But I just can't think what we've done to warrant such behaviour.

"I'm frightened to go out when there are gangs of 20 or 20 kids hanging around because if they decide to start something I haven't got a hope in hell. I don't want to go back there in case whoever did it hasn't achieved what they wanted to.

"I've lived in lots of different places but I've never known anything like this before," she added.

"What sort of raving lunatics would do a thing like this?"

DC Pete Puchalski said: "We aren't linking this incident to several car fires that happened in the area that night. We are treating this as a separate, serious incident."