(dpa) - Detectives were conducting a major inquiry Sunday into an arson attack the previous day on an apartment block in Germany inhabited by Turkish immigrants, but said they had no firm leads yet.
Five residents inhaled toxic fumes in the pre-dawn Saturday incident and two younger women among them were treated in hospital. A man living in the house used a hand-held fire extinguisher to put out the blaze, lit in a pram, before it could spread.
A team of 10 detectives has been assigned to the case in Backnang, 25 kilometres north-east of Stuttgart, amid fears that it was an attack by homicidal racists against the residents of the 13-apartment block on account of their ethnicity.
Most are ethnic Turks, while one tenant is Norwegian and others come from former Yugoslavia.
"The inquiry is continuing with all directions open," a police spokesman in Backnang said early Sunday. "It was assessing evidence of a racist motive," primarily a misspelled racist message found on the rear wall of the building.
The crudely written racist message spanned several metres of a wall and appeared to be linked to the attack, but it was not yet certain it had been scrawled there at the same time as the fire was lit.
The line, on the backyard side of the building, said, "All die now." Next to it were two swastikas drawn the wrong way round.
Police said petrol or some other accelerant had been poured into the pram before it was set alight, but they doubted that the fire could have spread into the structure even if it had not been put out.
Prams and push-chairs are often parked in the public foyers of German apartment buildings since they cannot be carried up or down stairs to the tenants' private spaces.
The attackers appeared to have entered the building by an unlocked rear door. A first-floor resident noticed the smell of smoke in the early morning. She called the fire services and her brother quickly put out the fire.
The Turkish minority in Germany has been concerned in recent weeks that it may be under attack from homicidal arsonists, although inquiries into the cause of a February 3 fire that killed nine Turks in Ludwigshafen have been inconclusive.
The Backnang attack had a resemblance to a widely reported but later disproved claim that a Ludwigshafen blaze began in a pram at street level. But forensic scientists concluded that that fire had somehow ignited in the old building's basement.
In the worst attack on Turks in Germany, five women were killed in 1993 in Solingen when racist youths set their home alight.