The husband of murdered PC Sharon Beshenivsky agonised for a week over how to tell their youngest children of her death.

Paul Beshenivsky, 42, said he finally decided to break the news to seven-year-old Paul and four-year-old Lydia when they returned to their home in Hainworth, near Keighley, yesterday.

The children had been staying with friends since their 38-year-old mother was gunned down by armed robbers last Friday, on Lydia's birthday.

Mr Beshenivsky told a national newspaper today that on entering the house Lydia spotted hundreds of condolence cards in the lounge and asked where her mother was, saying "there are so many cards - there must have been a lot of birthdays".

He said he told them their mother had gone to heaven and was "keeping an eye on them".

He added that Lydia cried and kept asking: "Why did those bad men put Mummy in the sky?".

PC Beshenivsky was shot down as she and a colleague, PC Teresa Milburn, 37, went to investigate a robbery at a travel agents in Morley Street, Bradford.

PC Milburn was injured by a shot in the shoulder

Mr Beshenivsky told the newspaper when he saw policemen at the door of the home he and his wife had moved into in May, just two months after she became a police officer, he assumed she had invited them to their young daughter's birthday party last Friday - the day of the shooting.

But they had come to rush him to the hospital.

The landscape gardener said when he heard the news he "felt as if my guts had been ripped out. I didn't want to believe it."

He added: "She loved her job. She liked the difference she made. We had so many things to do for the rest of our lives.

"How do you fill those holes when you can't fill them together? Those holes seem like bottomless pits."

He said he believed capital punishment would be "too good" for the people who committed the murder, adding: "I want them to know - to feel - exactly what they have done."