AN infant was yesterday burnt to death when gunmen fire-bombed a house in the volatile Olympic Gardens community in St Andrew. Police said Jordane Gordon, who would have celebrated his second birthday next week, was found buried beneath a pile of rubble inside the bullet-riddled house his father and grandmother shared on White Wing Avenue.

According to the police, the child's skin was burnt from his body in some sections, exposing his bones which were blackened by the fire.

No one else was injured in the incident, which police believe was set by thugs in reprisal for the shooting death of Horace Goodison and the injury of another man in another section of the community about two hours earlier.

"There is a gang warfare between men from the White Wing area and men from the 'Columbia Click' gang operating out of Cling Avenue," said Inspector Steve Brown, director of the Constabulary Communication Network (CCN), the police's information arm.

"We are told that this morning men from the White Wing gang went on to Delissa Avenue where they shot two members from the Columbia Click gang. Men from that gang then retaliated and invaded this community where they fired several shots and firebombed the houses," Brown told the Observer yesterday afternoon.

The gunmen, said the CCN boss, were apparently after the child's father, whom he said was a person of interest in the investigation of the Dellissa Road shooting.

He could not say whether or not the child's father was inside the house during the gunmen's attack, but said that officers from several police divisions were mobilised to search surrounding premises for suspects of both shootings.

Yesterday, the child's mother, who lives in a nearby community, collapsed when she got news about the child's death. The grief-stricken woman rolled several times on ground, pleading with Inspector Brown to allow her to see her child's corpse.

"I just want to see him, officer. I just want to see my baby, please," she screamed, her cries drowning out her mother's wails in a distance.

She was consoled by persons on the scene, one of whom claimed that the brazen gunmen had ordered persons inside the burning building to rescue the child after they were told that he was trapped inside.