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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A teenage girl had collapsed in tears but had a tissue with the word life printed on it: Thioulouse told her she wouldn't die while she was holding it. Five miles across central London, on a train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, Michael Henning heard the bomb and then saw "lots of silver"—in reality, shards of glass that sliced up the right side of his face while leaving the left side virtually untouched. "I'm still shaking out the glass," he said on his way out of the Royal London Hospital. "I feel very, very lucky. Within 10 feet, two people must have died."

Two of the bombs—at Aldgate and Edgware Road—were in trains just below the surface, on so-called "cut and cover" lines, so the force of the blast was dissipated into a relatively wide tunnel. Seven people died at Edgware Road and seven at Aldgate. But the bomb on the Piccadilly Line near King's Cross was in one of the Underground's deep tubes, some 100 ft. below the surface. There the blast had nowhere to go, and emergency workers said the scene was hellish.

Twenty-one people are known to have died on the train, although as the rescuers searched for more bodies in the sweltering rat-infested tunnels, it was all but certain that the toll would rise. The bus bomb in Bloomsbury came nearly an hour later. Prime Minister Tony Blair was notified of the attacks while at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, where he was chairing the annual meeting of the G-8 group of leading industrial nations. He quickly relayed the news to the other leaders, including President George W. Bush, and then returned to London. "It is important that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people," Blair said.

But nagging questions persisted over who, precisely, had bombed London, and how they managed to penetrate the defenses of a city that for years had its guard up against just such attacks. A British source with access to intelligence reports said there were no indications of imminent attack: "There was no sign on the horizon, at all." Indeed, exactly one month earlier, at a regular briefing with corporate executives and managers of critical infrastructure systems, MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence agency, had downgraded its threat alert to the lowest level since Sept. 11, 2001. An aide to Blair, asked about the failure of the security services to detect the plot, said, "There will be a time to ask questions about what happened. But for now we need to let the security services get on with the very big job they have."

An immediate focus of attention was the type of explosives used in the attack—and the nature of those who planted them. Scotland Yard insisted there was no firm evidence the attacks were carried out by suicide bombers and said that each of the bombs on the trains probably contained less than 10 lbs. of explosives. The confidential Aegis report guessed that each weighed just 5 lbs., small enough to place in a small rucksack. The bombs, police said, were placed on the floor of the train cars. In the case of the bus, shortly after the explosion a TIME reporter saw a tall, thin man in a black pinstripe suit telling police officers, "I think I saw something," and mentioning a man with a rucksack, before the witness was whisked away. Later, passengers told the press they had seen a young man on the bus playing with a bag before the bomb went off. Scotland Yard says only that the high explosives were "not homemade." Roland Jacquard, a French terrorism analyst with close links to the authorities in Paris, told TIME that his sources said early tests indicated that the explosives were of "military quality and provenance" and quite unlike the industrial material, stolen from mines, that was used in the Madrid bombings.