"'I'M going to torture and terrorise you for three days, because that's how long we'll be here before the police come in. So get comfy."

Natasha Green told officers she thought she was going to die as her drug-crazed estranged husband ranted and threatened her at the start of the third-longest armed siege in the history of English policing.

Paul burst into the house at Haskells Road, Parkstone, at 5.30am, eyes bulging from crack cocaine and bellowing "I told you I was coming for you tonight" before raining blows on her with a sawn-off shotgun.

Natasha is so scarred by the events of last May that she could not give evidence at the inquest yesterday, but the statement she gave to police described in graphic detail her hours in the house.

"I leaned over to protect (our one-year-old daughter) because I could see she was covered in blood and screaming," she said.

"I was struck a further two times to the rear of my head."

She said she could hear her other children - aged eight, six and four - screaming at Paul not to hurt their mummy, and then he sent them out of the house, with her 17-year-old brother carrying the one-year-old, and turned on her again.

She tried desperately to escape and begged for mercy, but he repeated his threats and blows, showing her bullets he said were meant for her and him.

"He ran at me with the gun," she said. "He pushed it into my face and told me I was on a points system. He said: 'You had 30 points to start with and it depends how many points you're left with whether you live or die'.

'So far, you're down to 20, you have taken some points off for screaming, trying to escape, trying to take the gun, lying and trying to get out. So watch how you open your mouth'. I was numb with pain and fear."

She told police this was the second time the drug dealer had held her hostage at gunpoint.

In 2000, a year after they were married, he held her in their home in Yeovil, threatening to blow her head off as she cradled her baby son in her arms.

She fled to a refuge in Bournemouth, and a jury acquitted him of the firearms charge, but he was jailed for drug offences soon afterwards - one of 10 terms he spent in prison - and they regained contact while he was in jail.

Natasha moved to Poole, and for a time after his release, Paul lived in Haskells Road with her, but he soon began to revert to the controlling, abusive behaviour he had shown her in Yeovil.

She told the police he tried to strangle her, and when they would go swimming, he would hold her under water "to see how long it would be before I stopped breathing".

They split up and, in February 2004, she applied for an injunction against him, and he came to the house and slashed up her clothes, causing £4,000 worth of damage.

He was arrested and bailed to stay out of Dorset, but she said he continued to harass her and she had a panic button installed with a link to Poole council.

She pressed this button when he arrived on the morning of May 2, and the police were soon at the scene.

Detective Superintendent Phil James, who investigated the police treatment of the incident, said the officers did not go in because they had heard him threaten to shoot her if they did.

Two hours after he arrived in the house, Green suddenly fell asleep, and Natasha grabbed the opportunity to sneak past him and dive out of the window he had smashed to get into the house.

She ran, bleeding and bruised, to the police outside the house and was taken by police escort to Poole hospital, where she was given stitches for a gash to her head.

Trained police negotiators, supported by siege experts and psychiatrists from around the country, began to speak to Paul, trying to get him to come out peacefully as neighbours were evacuated from the street.

They called in his brother, Steven Green, and a former partner, Stacey Harris, to speak to him from a telephone in a portable building on Haskells Road.

"He was tired, worn out," said Stephen, who spoke to Paul on May 5, four days into the seige.

"He didn't want to go back to prison. He wanted Natasha, kept asking for Natasha."

Paul said he was going for a cigarette and a cup of tea and then, at around 3.45pm, Stephen heard a loud bang from inside the house.

Paul never spoke to the police again, and two hours later they broke into the house to find his body, lying face down, on a blood-soaked bed upstairs.

Det Supt James said there were photographs of his children and Natasha arranged around the bed, and a message written in lipstick on a mirror in the lounge saying: "I will be with you forever, sorry Tasha, love you xxx."

Pathologist Dr Basil Purdue said there were traces of morphine and cocaine in Paul's urine and he had died from a single shot to the chest, which destroyed his heart.

"There was nothing to suggest it had been inflicted by anyone other than Mr Green himself," he said.

First published: October 12