TWO homes were destroyed and two men had lucky escapes in the early hours of yesterday after someone set fire to a sofa which had been left outside one of the houses for collection.
An accidental fire seems highly unlikely, especially since the furniture had apparently been pushed as close as possible to the west Belfast dwelling before it was set alight.
One of the residents was woken by the smell of smoke in his Ardmonagh Parade home in the Turf Lodge area and made his escape as the blaze engulfed the house next door, where another man had a lucky escape.
Another two houses suffered serious smoke damage while a woman and a young child in one of those also had to flee. A councillor condemned the incident as “reckless” and said that it was fortunate that no-one had been killed.
If, as suspected, this was a deliberate act, then there is a strong argument for treating this not just as an act of arson but even of attempted murder.
The community here has experienced enough loss of life caused by the deliberate setting of fires to know that any such action has the dreadful potential to end in tragedy.
Despite these past experiences, arson attacks are not uncommon. Indeed there have been several deliberate fires in the Turf Lodge area over the past few months.
There is no suggestion that this latest incident is connected to any of those earlier fires, so it could just as easily have been a simple act of vandalism.
Whatever the reason, the community could be grieving the senseless loss of one or more lives. As it is, two homes have been destroyed and two others severely damaged, leaving at least two people looking for emergency accommodation.
There is no excuse for such reckless and potentially deadly behaviour. It is to be hoped that police will be successful in apprehending those responsible and that their sentence will provide a realistic deterrent to repeat attacks.
