'My nightmare neighbour threatened to kill me'

Saif Altai's nightmare neighbour threatened to kill him, and his ordeal didn't end when the police got involved, because as soon as he was released from prison, he came round to continue his campaign of harassment.

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In last night's installment of the Channel 5 programme 'The Nightmare Neighbour Next Door', Saif explained that he had moved to what he thought would be his dream home in Chester in 2014. However, soon after moving in, his downstairs neighbour James Turfrey had some friends round for a noisy party. After Saif went downstairs at 4am to ask them to keep the noise down, he said his neighbour started to make his life a misery.

Shortly after the confrontation, he saw his neighbour going through his bins, so he reported him - and things deteriorated even further. He says Turfrey would shout racist abuse at Saif and his partner all night. One night he woke up to find him banging the walls with a hammer and shouting: "You want me to be quiet? I'll show you what quiet is!"

In February 2016, Turfrey tried to break down Saif's door, so he called the police. Turfrey was arrested, but released with a caution. In June last year he shouted at Saif in his garden, and threatened to kill him. He was arrested again, and this time he was jailed. He was sentenced to 16 weeks in prison, and given a two-year restraining order. However, he was released after a fortnight, and went straight back to his old ways. He was arrested again for breaching the order, and sent back to prison. However, Saif says he still doesn't feel safe.

Nightmare neighbours

We have all had neighbours who we don't get along with, but over the years, there have been some people whose harassment of their neighbours has been extraordinary. We've tracked down three really odd cases.

1. In 2014 a couple in the Lake District was ordered to pay £196,000 in damages and £400,000 in court costs, after a campaign of harassment against their neighbours. Resentment started decades earlier, because the couple's family used to live in the property, before moving to the smaller cottage next door. When the larger home was bought as a holiday property, they resented the purchase, and tried to drive their neighbours away. Among the more horrible things they did were to moon at the security cameras, before painting over the lens. They also piled rotting rubbish in their garden, and let dogs in to foul the grass.

2. Two months earlier, a couple in Kent was found guilty of harassing an elderly neighbour. They wanted to increase the size of their garden and stop their elderly neighbour from exercising her right of way over it, so they wrote to social services claiming she had attacked them - and trying to get her sectioned. The judge said their actions were 'troubling and sinister', and they were made to pay costs and damages totaling over £300,000.

3. Last year a man from Croydon created a fake poison-pen Facebook account in the name of his neighbour, and published insults against himself. He reported it to police, who were suspicious about the standard of English on the page, and discovered the truth. The poison pen writer was jailed for ten months. The disagreement apparently started when one of the men had successfully campaigned against the introduction of a resident's parking zone in their road.