A man was seen laughing as he hurled petrol bombs from his car at an asylum centre in Dover after driving 100 miles to the port town.

The smartly-dressed grey-haired suspect in his late 50s threw three fuel bottles strapped to fireworks at the Western Jet Foil and the port town's docks before driving off and killing himself with a makeshift noose.

Two other people were injured.

Police soon found his body at a nearby petrol station and the Army's bomb squad was called in to check over his white SUV. Another device was found but judged to be safe.

Kent Police last night said the incident was not being treated as a terrorist attack while sources suggested the man is thought to have acted alone and had driven 100 miles to carry out the bombing.

Lorry driver Mark Wilkinson told our reporter at the scene: "I was going for a coffee and when I arrived at the garage I was told I couldn't cross the road into the garage because it was a crime scene.

"You don't expect to see anything like that on a Sunday morning just going for a coffee.

"As I walked past I saw a car with a body. At first thought it was a gangland killing or something but obviously it wasn't.

"The guy who died seemed to be in his late 50s or early 60s. He was white and grey haired and looked fairly well dressed."

In the panic which followed Sunday morning's attack 700 asylum seekers were taken to Manston Airport's makeshift processing site, which was already dangerously overcrowded and last night was home to 4,000 people, despite having capacity for 1,600.

The Telegraph reported that individual rooms at hotels could be booked by the Home Office in an attempt to ease tensions at Manston. It would mean asylum seekers would be staying alongside the public but would also avert the need to book entire hotels, adding to the £6.8 million a day already spent.

The bombing came just hours after The Times reported Home Secretary Suella Braverman's refusal to move people from Manston to hotels led to outbreaks of diphtheria and scabies. There has been at least one allegation of sexual assault against a member of staff at the centre.

More than 110 charities have written to Ms Braverman urging her to create safe routes to solve the small boats crisis. They said it was "worth dreaming about" in a nod to her controversial comments that she her "dream" was to see a Rwanda-bound plane packed with asylum seekers taking off .

More than 40,000 people have so far made the perilous crossing of the world's busiest shipping lane, with 85% of processed asylum claims judged to be genuine but 96% still yet to be checked.

Some 1,900 came over the weekend. Last year's then-record total was 28,500.

Inspectors are said to have been speechless when they arrived at Manston and were confronted with horrific conditions.

Home Office officials are now considering using holiday parks and old student housing the alleviate the pressure.

They are also said to be considering expansing the Manston site as it was revealed some people had been kept there for a month.

A government source told The Telegraph: "To make it easier and more efficient, we are looking at spot booking of hotels rather than requiring a whole hotel," said a government

source.

"We have two competing legal duties. First, we don’t want to have people in Manston for too long. Secondly, we have a legal duty not to make people destitute. You cannot have thousands of people sent away with no plan to safely accommodate them."

Senior Tories including Dover and Deal MP Natalie Elphicke said yesterday's incident came after a week of rising tensions which began last Sunday when asylum seekers ran into nearby Aycliffe, with one ending up in a woman's bedroom.

Sir Roger Gale will today seek to ensure the situation at Manston is addressed.

"The system has broken down because they are not being moved on," he said, adding that he'd oppose any expansion of Manston.

There is a 100,000-plus backlog of asylum claims, with 30,000 people being held in hotels.

One proposal was to quadruple the number of officials working to reduce the backlog and introduce a separate fast-track deportation route for Albanian Channel migrants, who now account for nearly a third of those who have reached the UK this year.