Rush Hour Terror

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According to a confidential report produced the day after the bombing by a private London security firm, Aegis Defense Services Ltd., which was seen and read by Pentagon officials, the team was probably four to six strong, although it is technically feasible that one or two bombers conducted the attacks. A British official says that based on the method of the attacks, "they would have needed quite a number of people, possibly as many as 10." The Aegis report says it is possible that the explosives were "constructed by an experienced bombmaker, possibly coming to the U.K. for that very purpose."

Investigators are also looking into whether Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's top operative in Iraq, may have helped supply explosives for the London bombers. Meanwhile, a U.S. intelligence source tells TIME that last Friday a Pakistani was detained outside London at Stansted Airport, allegedly with a map of the Underground system and the three bombed train stations circled. A British official confirmed that a Pakistani had been arrested but said there was no known connection between the event at Stansted and the bombings. A source close to the interrogation of Abu-Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan arrested in Pakistan who has been in U.S. custody for six weeks and is suspected of being Osama bin Laden's third in command, says al-Libbi told interrogators about the possibility of attacks in London and had in his possession city and Underground maps of London. U.S. authorities said there was no evidence of an imminent threat against the U.S., but a senior U.S. intelligence official told TIME that the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies have stepped up surveillance of possible terrorists or terrorist sympathizers on American soil.

The British knew it was coming. they didn't know when, they didn't know where, they didn't know how. But ever since Sept. 11, 2001—ever since New York and Bali and Jakarta and Karachi and Riyadh and Casablanca and Madrid and Baghdad were hit by radical Islamic terrorists—Londoners had recognized that sooner or later, the bombers would get around to them too. "I don't feel angry," said research student Kevin Benish, 21, as he placed a bunch of lilies on a makeshift shrine outside King's Cross station the next day. "I knew it wasn't a question of if but when something like this would happen."

The attacks came in a city that was feeling extraordinarily pleased with itself. Its population growing, its economy booming, reveling in its modern self-image as a tolerantly multicultural place, London was having fun. The weekend before the bombings, the city had hosted the last few days of Wimbledon and a Live 8 concert in Hyde Park with more than 200,000 in attendance. "London," wrote Henry Porter in the Observer, "seems to be the hub of the world." And that was three days before the city won the right to hold the Olympics, beating out a field that included the only other cities that have traditionally had global hublike pretensions, Paris and New York.

Then the lights went out. On Thursday morning, Chris Lowry, 17, a lawyer's clerk, was sitting on a Piccadilly Line train outside King's Cross when "a fat blast came from the front end. I actually think I fell out of my seat at first—all I could see was smoke." Eventually, emergency workers moved passengers to the back of the train and up into the station, where Lowry remembers "trails of blood going up the stairways." Nicolas Thioulouse, 27, a French architect, was in a train under Edgware Road station when a bomb exploded on a train on the adjacent track. "I had the feeling I was in a fish tank," says Thioulouse, "seeing people in the opposite car with their faces completely covered by blood." People tried to cheer each another up.

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