I emailed a friend in Britain to see if he was okay and had a response:
Smiles. yup, me my family and all the friends i've contacted are all fine. A couple of people i know left a hit station 10 minutes before the explosions. Still only 38 dead, but i imagine that'll increase a lot when they start to clear the 'very' dead. All extremely sad, and very counter intuitive. It's ironic that acts of terrorism encourage international warfare to defeat terrorism, and of course that has the effect of increasing the numbers of terrorists.
Damn right, though I might use a stronger word than "ironic."
I suppose some of the "very dead" were on that 30 bus, my old bus. Why did the bomber go upstairs, sit at the back, I wonder? Bus still crowded at almost 10 a.m.? At
least that was probably responsible for a few people surviving, if badly injured.
Eyewitness Belinda Seabrook said she saw the explosion rip though the double-decker bus as it approached Tavistock Square, between Euston and Russell Square stations. "I was on the bus in front and heard an incredible bang. I turned round and half the double-decker bus was in the air. There were loads of people screaming," she said. "The explosion seemed to be at the back of the bus. The roof flew off and went up about 10 metres. It then floated back down. I shouted at the passengers to get off the bus. They went into Tavistock Park nearby. There were obviously people badly injured. A parking attendant said he thought a piece of human flesh had landed on his arm," said Raj Mattoo, 35, who was standing on a street corner near Tavistock Square. Accountant Tim Priestley, 27, from Billericay, Essex, was at his desk when the bomb exploded on the packed bus in Tavistock Place, outside his office opposite Russell Square tube station. "I felt a bang and a shudder. "The top of the bus was lifted off," he said. "There were people covered in soot and bleeding." He said people were evacuated from the nearby buildings and led into a hotel. People were walking around dazed,” Mr Priestley said. "The police were there very quickly. They were brilliant." Ayobami Bello, a security guard at the nearby London School of Tropical Hygiene said he was only 30 metres from the bus when it exploded. He said: "It was terrible. The back was completely gone, it was blown off completey and a dead body was hanging out and there were dead bodies on the road. It was a horrible thing." Bello said others sat slumped in their bus seats, some arms and legs missing. "There was panic and everyone was running for their lives. Everyone was in confusion." ...here...
