A firefighter told a murder trial today how he battled to save a woman and her toddler son from a Chatham house fire.

Stephen Enright was on duty at Medway Fire Station, a few hundred yards from a house fire in Chatham Hill, when 999 calls began coming in at 2.32am last September 10.

By the time crews arrived at the terraced home, three minutes later, the front door had been almost completely destroyed and flames were billowing out.

The fire killed Melissa Crook, 20, and her 15-month-old son Noah. Melissa's father Mark, 49, escaped but died of his burns six days later.

Melissa's mother Amanda and her brother Bohdan, survived the terrifying ordeal.

Her estranged husband Danai Muhammadi (pictured below left), his girlfriend Emma Smith and friend Farhad Mahmud deny triple murder and double attempted murder.

Firefighters with hoses and breathing apparatus went into the burning house almost immediately.

Mr Enright told a jury at Maidstone Crown Court: "It was very intense. We went through the front door and started fighting the fire from the hallway in and around the stairs, and the downstairs hallway which was fully alight."

Mark Crook (left), his daughter Melissa and her toddler son Noah (right) were killed in a house fire in Chatham

When he got upstairs, he said, the first door he opened was to the bathroom.

He said: "As we proceeded up the stairs visibility came down to about six or seven inches.

"I could hear what sounded like a crying noise, it did sound like a child. I told Rob [a colleague] to stop fighting the fire so we could listen to where the noise was coming from."

He walked into the bathroom and: "I swept my arm underneath the bath and came across a cat. I have cats myself and a distressed cat can sound like a child. I then removed the cat."

A statement from firefighter Paul Bates said he searched Melissa's bedroom, starting with the cot and chest of drawers, and found her body next to her upturned bed.

Mark Dennis QC, prosecuting, said: "He asked by radio whether it was necessary to continue searching for the child at this stage, given the nature of the devastation of that room, and he was told not to. In due course, the body of the child was found in the same room."

Neighbour James Bugden was woken by "a high-pitched scream that you know you never want to hear again" through his open window in Waghorn Road, several streets away in Luton and looking across the valley to Chatham Hill.

He said: "The scream was 'you are killing me, you are killing me, you are going to kill me.'"

Mr Bugden, who works on racing cars, claimed he immediately heard a car being driven down Luton Road at an "erratic" speed.

He told the jury: "It powered itself back up down Luton Road at quite some speed." When asked if it broke the speed limit, he said: "Without a doubt."

Next, he said: "There was a very muffled boom but you could see the skyline just light up at the top of Chatham Hill. One minute it was dark, the next minute it was just engulfed in flames, the house."

Olegs Jefimovs, who used a For Sale sign to try and break Melissa’s window with a friend as he passed the house returning from a night drinking, added to police: "The woman was shouting ‘help, help’ in the room upstairs."

He said: "The woman stopped crying for help before we broke the window and I feared she was dead. [Arturs Osipovs, my friend,] started crying."

The jury heard the blaze could have only been started with the help of a jet sprayer.

Fire expert of 39 years Rodrick Stewart said traces of petrol were found by the stairs but not the front door, despite the letterbox being a foot or two off the ground.

This, he said, meant a high-powered jet must have been used to spread the petrol.

It also funnelled the fire up the stairs, making it far more deadly.

The court was shown a three-litre Hozelock Courier garden sprayer, used for spreading weedkiller, which police found the bath of Mahmud’s flat.

It contained traces of petrol and the nozzle was in the "jet" mode.

A demonstration showed it would take more than 150 pumps on the handle to empty it.

A driver filled a garden sprayer at the Texaco garage in Maidstone Road, Chatham, just 20 minutes before the inferno. The court heard this was Muhammadi.

Prosecutors claim the two men, egged on by a "besotted" Emma Smith, drove from Maidstone to Chatham to torch the house.

Mr Stewart said the petrol could not have been spread either with a green petrol can found in Mahmud’s boot, or several drinks bottles outside the home.

He added: "There was no accidental ignition. This was an act of human intervention."

The prosecution claims Muhammadi and Mahmud, egged on by Smith, used a garden sprayer to pump up to seven litres of petrol through the letterbox and set it alight.

Muhammadi, 24, of Britannia Street, Coventry; Mahmud, 35, of Fernhill Road, Maidstone; and Smith, 21, of Barley Lea, Coventry, are each charged with three counts of murder.

The trio are also charged with attempting to murder Amanda and Bohdan.

They deny all the charges and the trial continues.