A SINGLE mum is recovering from a terrifying ordeal after armed police wrongly smashed in her front door while she was giving her young son a bath upstairs.

Innocent Rachel Whitmarsh was ordered out of the Poole property while her boy, Jordan, aged six, was left frightened and alone in the bathtub.

Officers, who were hunting an escaped convict in the botched raid, smashed in an outer door, then screamed for her to open the second door leading up to her flat in Ashley Road, Parkstone.

“Afterwards I was shaking, crying, scared out of my life. I’m quite a strong person but I’m still too scared to go back to the flat, and my son definitely won’t go back,” said Rachel.

The shocked 29-year-old, who works for Poole council and as a school dinner lady, is now staying with family in nearby Alderney.

She is also worried the man police were searching for might come back.

“They showed me a photograph and asked if I knew this man, but wouldn’t say anything more than he was an escaped prisoner who lived at this address two years before.

“Police won’t tell me what he’s done. What if he comes back here?”

She said of Tuesday’s 10pm raid: “I was giving Jordan a bath.

“The problem with my flat is, it is quite high up and I couldn’t hear the main front door – they said they’d been knocking for 15 minutes.

“After they kicked this in, I heard them at the second door shouting, ‘Police, open up or we’ll break the door down.’ “They just pushed past me and ran into the flat – they were armed, so I was scared.”

After the officers were convinced the flat was clean, they made sure the door was secure and left.

Rachel said: “They told me to have a stiff brandy and just left. The reason I’ve contacted the Echo is because the experience frightened the life out of me.

“Police shouldn’t be able to go around acting like this – no real aftercare or nothing.”

A Dorset Police spokesman offered the force’s apologies to Rachel and said officers met with her yesterday.

Inspector Andy Allkins, of Dorset Police tactical firearms unit, said: “Although routinely armed officers carried out the enquiry, the man sought is not assessed as a danger to the public. Routinely, armed officers in Dorset carry out all those duties performed by their unarmed colleagues.”