A GRANDFATHER accused of building a bomb to deal with nightmare neighbours he said had plagued his family told police the desperate measure was a cry for help.

Nicholas Smith was arrested after being found making napalm at his County Durham home, and admitted after his arrest: “I just wanted to kill them – I had had enough.”

Teesside Crown Court heard that the ex-school caretaker searched the internet for bomb-making instructions after a dispute with neighbours became too much for him.

Mr Smith is said to have been caught mixing household items, including lighter fuel, to make an improvised explosive, and told police: “I’m making a f***ing bomb.”

Officers went to the married 53- year-old’s home in Horden on May 8 in response to a call about eggs being thrown at it – one of a string of complaints he made about yobs.

A recording of an interview he gave after his arrest was played to a jury yesterday, and revealed the torment he had suffered since moving from the east Midlands.

He said: “I had had enough with getting hassle day after day after day. It is killing my wife, it is killing me. I can’t take it. That’s why I did this – a cry for help.”

Mr Smith could be heard getting emotional on the recording, and wiped away tears in the dock as he listened to it being played to the jury of seven women and five men.

“We are being terrorised in our own home,” he sobbed to police. “It is like being in a prison – being terrorised day after day. It has destroyed me.” Mr Smith told officers about a series of heartaches which had blighted his life before he moved to east Durham from Worksop, in Nottinghamshire, in September last year.

He said his first wife ran off with his best friend, his young daughter died after being hit by a minibus on the first day of term and he lost his job after a school fire.

In the interview, he said he had also worked as a cleaner, applied three times to be a contestant on the TV show Gladiators and spent three years in the Territorial Army.

After telling police his grandson suffered a cot death aged nine months, he said: “I have had to put up with some things, but I’m a fighter, not a quitter.”

Mr Smith, of Twelfth Street, Horden, denies two charges under the Explosives Substances Act. His defence is expected to begin on Monday.