POLICE are investigating reports of an arson attack at a home where a woman and her three children were sleeping.

Seven-foot flames engulfed rubbish left in the front garden of the Bournemouth property, burning down an adjacent fence in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

A police spokesman said: “We received reports of an arson attack at 2.30am this morning at an address in Throop Close.”

She confirmed that up to three bins appeared to have been set on fire and that police have made house-to-house and CCTV inquiries.

Raven Stewart, her three children aged 8, 14 and 16, and her fiancé, chef Alex Kyriacou, had only been in the property for two days before, she claims, arsonists struck.

“My son woke me up at a quarter to three, telling me the front garden was on fire,” she said.

The blaze appeared to have been started in the bags of rubbish and over-spilling wheelie bins which, claims Raven, had been left there by previous tenants. “Some of the rubbish was dead grass - it's a bad combination,” she said.

As the flames ignited the property’s six-foot fence, Raven called the fire service who took around ten minutes to put them out. “The front garden is quite wide so we would have been able to get out of the house if we had to,” she said. “But if the fire people hadn’t got here as fast as they did it could have spread to the house itself, or even my neighbours’ homes.”

Raven said the fire service had discovered a 'trail of petrol' leading from her front garden to the road. “I saw them hosing the road down which was good because the petrol wasn’t too far from my neighbour’s car,” she said.

She said her landlord, Sovereign Housing Association, had agreed to remove the remaining rubbish and repair a fence which was damaged in the blaze, and that a kind neighbour had offered the family their spare wheelie bin.

“It’s a horrible thing to happen, especially as we are getting married next month and had planned to hold the party here,” she said.