Rush Hour Terror

Sunday, Jul. 10, 2005 By MICHAEL ELLIOTT
TO THE RESCUE: Commuters pull the living from the bombed double-decker bus
MATTHEW ROSENBERG / MIRRORPIX
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As George Psaradakis, 49, drove a No. 30 double-decker red bus through the streets of London last Thursday, there were signs that something was wrong. The city's traffic—never easy—was in a state of chaos. Thousands of commuters had left Underground train stations and were milling about the streets looking for alternative ways to get to work. Few of them had any idea of the scale of the devastation below: moments before, three bombs had gone off in the space of a minute on London's Underground railway. Psaradakis, whose bus was packed, had been forced to divert from the main roads into the leafy squares of Bloomsbury, home to the colleges of the University of London. At 9:47 he stopped his bus in Tavistock Square to get directions. Just then, Lou Stein, an American theater producer who has lived in London for 20 years, heard a tremendous thud from his apartment 100 yards away and ran outside. "It was oddly silent," he says, with "a lot of distressed people crying into each other's arms.

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The top of the bus was lifted off, like the top of a tin can that's just been ripped open. There was smoke everywhere." When a TIME reporter arrived on the scene about 25 minutes later, he could see smears of blood all over the facade of the British Medical Association headquarters in the square and survivors comforting each other. Psaradakis survived, but at least 13 others died in the blast. Witnesses told of seeing severed limbs and a body with its head blown off.

The blast in Tavistock Square was the culmination of the worst attack on London since World War II. Two days after the bombings, the official toll was 49 dead—a figure expected to rise—and some 700 injured. About 100 were still in hospitals around the capital, 22 listed as "severely injured." While the initial casualty figures were lower than in some previous attacks, such as the train bombings in Madrid in March 2004, the shock of the London bombings reverberated because they occurred in circumstances—and in a city—that are familiar to so many around the world. The first images of the hellish scenes in the London Underground came from cameras on passengers' cell phones, the latest innovation in the grim art of terrorism documentary. While rescuers struggled to recover bodies deep in the tunnels, police became enmeshed in the painstaking forensic work that accompanies a scene of mass murder—checking out claims that a passenger on the bus had been seen fiddling with a bag, examining the chemical fingerprints of the explosives used, looking at tiny, bloodstained body parts for telltale clues.

Initial responsibility was claimed by a little-known group that said it spoke for al-Qaeda, declaring the attacks retaliation for British support of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two days after the attacks, British police said no arrests in connection with the bombings had been made. But late last week a British official told TIME that the investigation is gravitating toward the possibility that as in Madrid, the attacks involved al-Qaeda-linked Moroccans, perhaps drawn from Britain's Moroccan community, coupled with outside guidance and bombmaking help. The official says authorities believe there may be links between the London bombers and those behind the Madrid attacks. "There's a lot of concern that the group is still here," the official says. "It may not presage any imminent attack.

Maybe the greater danger is that they go dormant for weeks, if not months. It's a very considerable worry."

The links to the Madrid bombings are tantalizing. London's Sunday Times reported that Spanish security sources are said to have warned four months ago that Mustapha Setmariam Nasar, 47, a Syrian, had identified Britain as a likely target and had set up a sleeper cell of terrorists there. Eric Denece, who heads the French Center of Intelligence Research in Paris, says that "there is some evidence" that Nasar helped plan the Madrid attack, and that "it wouldn't surprise me at all if he's found to have overseen London from afar as well."