BELFAST, Jan 8: A pregnant Pakistani woman and her brother-in-law were targets in the latest racially motivated attack to have hit a Protestant district of Northern Ireland's capital, police said on Thursday.

Police suspect a Protestant gang to be responsible for hurling a two-metre-long plank through the front window of the victims' house in the Donegall Road area of Belfast, home to armed Protestant groups, late on Wednesday.

Broken glass showered the living room where the owners had been eating 20 minutes earlier, leaving the occupants badly shocked, though without cuts.

"Police believe that the attack on the house was racially motivated," a police spokesman said. Just before Christmas, two Chinese families and a third of Ugandan descent fled their homes in Donegall Road after they were targeted by a gang on the same night.

In one of the incidents on Dec 20, the gang burst into a house, assaulted two pregnant Chinese women and smashed a man in the face with a brick, breaking his nose.-AFP