Immigration: Solingen: Hate fuelled boy who loved fire: Associated Press

HE WAS kicked as a child - and he kicked back. From the time Christian Riher entered a special infant school for disturbed children to the day of his arrest for the arson murder of five Turks who lived only four houses away in Solingen, his life was chaotic and violent.

His great love was the Schalke City football club, and he liked to paint swastikas and shout 'Heil Hitler]' according to his schoolmates. Sometimes he would go to Graefrath, a quaint medieval hilltown down the road, to drink beer at a club with a reputed right-wing activist who taught youngsters martial arts.

Riher was the first arrested for the arson attack last weekend. Three more youngsters were detained later. They are all being held on suspicion of murder.

Riher's father left his mother, Brigitte, before Christian was born, according to friends and neighbours. She sometimes beat the boy, and he occasionally smashed up the house or started fires. When he was eight he was sent to a home for wayward boys, then spent a year in Sweden and another year with foster parents, according to police reports quoted in two Solingen newspapers, the Tagesblatt and the Morgenpost. The foster parents sent him back. As a teenager, Riher bounced from school to school, before finally being kicked out of the Renpatt High School just a few months before the fire in Solingen.

Last year he and his mother moved into the last block of flats on a row of smart new buildings surrounded by fruit trees and big lawns. Early in 1993, they moved again, to a four-storey stucco block. Their attic flat had a view down the hill to the building with crossed wooden beams where Durmus Genc headed a Turkish household of 19 people, including his two sons and two daughters, their children and relatives.

A few months before the attack, Riher began working at a garage a few blocks away from his home. 'It seems that Christian was an unfriendly boy,' said Horst Kraemer, who lived across the street. 'Children in the neighborhood say that he was always drinking beer and yelled when they came near him.'

But not all remember him with disfavour. 'I liked him,' said a classmate at Renpatt, who refused to give his name. 'He used to cut up in class a lot and had funny names for everything. He called me 'Rabies'. '

The German press has been revealing details of the lives of the other suspects. 'Doctor's Son Arrested', said the mass-circulation Bild newspaper on its front page, accompanied by a picture of a 16- year-old boy, identified only as Felix, who had recently taken to wearing a bomber jacket with the insignia 'All power to the Nazis'. Bild said the boy's father had hung black crepe on the front door of the family home as a sign of mourning for the dead Turks. His mother is an environmental activist.

The local Tageblatt newspaper said another 23-year-old suspect, identified by prosecutors only as Markus G, was a soldier in the German army. He had been spotted in neo-Nazi outfits and is believed to be a member of a right- wing extremist political party.

Police now believe a bar-room brawl during a pre-wedding party triggered the attack.

They say Markus G, the doctor's son and a third suspect picked a fight in a local bar hours before the killings, mistakenly believing that two of their opponents were Turks.

After being thrown out, the trio ran into Christian Riher and complained to him about their dust-up with foreigners. Riher, prosecutors believe, suggested torching a Turkish family's home close to where he lived.

'The other three suspects, who also hated foreigners, went along with this suggestion,' the chief federal prosecutor, Alexander von Stahl, said yesterday. Riher got some petrol from a nearby filling station, doused the entrance of the Turks' home, threw in some newspapers and started the fire with a cigarette-lighter, according to Mr von Stahl. The other teenager helped him, he alleges, while the two men in their early twenties watched.

Today, a black banner of mourning stretches between two spruce trees at the entrance to Central High School, where Hatice Genc (18) studied before she, her sister, two nieces and a young visitor perished in the fire.

Christian Riher also attended the school, according to Horst Kraemer. No one knows if their paths ever crossed - the doomed girl and the boy now suspected of causing her death.