The Express & Echo has put up a £1,000 reward to help police find an arsonist who set light to an Exeter family’s home as they slept inside.

The race hate crime is believed to have been prompted by the terrorist atrocities in the US.

The family – a mother and father and their five-year-old child – managed to escape as the blaze took hold of the ground floor of their house.

But detectives say they could easily have died in the attack.

The victims had been subjected to verbal abuse in the days since September 11 – even though they are Sikhs of Indian descent and have lived all of their lives in Exeter.

Echo Editor Steve Hall said there had been very few racial incidents in the city since the outrages in the States and that different communities had rallied together. But the fire was a sickening development.

He said: “The attack was reprehensible and horribly misguided. It could have resulted in the deaths of three people – one of them a young child. The paper is anxious to do what it can to help bring those responsible to justice.”

The Echo has carried a number of articles to promote an understanding of the position of Exeter’s Muslim community and particularly of the 100 Afghan asylum-seekers now living in the city.

On the same day that it offered the reward, it also carried a front page open letter from the asylum seekers condemning terrorism.

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