Hunt on for London bombers

A huge manhunt was underway today to find the bombers who caused the London carnage which killed dozens of people and left hundreds injured.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said yesterday’s explosions bore all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida-related attack while Tony Blair said the country would not be intimidated by terrorists as he vowed that the culprits would be brought to justice.

Police were looking into claims from a group calling itself the Secret Organisation Group of al-Qaida of Jihad Organisation in Europe which said it was responsible for unleashing the 56 minutes of hell which terrorised the British capital.

Senior officers refused to rule out the possibility that Britain had been subjected to its first suicide bombing after the series of co-ordinated no warning strikes in the centre of the city.

A passenger on a double decker bus ripped apart in one of the four blasts said he saw an “extremely agitated” man rummaging in a bag just seconds before the explosion.

Scotland Yard put the confirmed death toll at 37 but that looked set to rise with 95 seriously injured among the 300 casualties taken to hospital.

Police sources said more than 40 people had died and Australian Prime Minister John Howard told reporters in Canberra said that the death toll was 52.

The largest atrocity in peacetime London began at 8.51am yesterday when seven people died following the first blast in a Tube tunnel 100 yards from Liverpool Street Station.

At 8.56am, a blast in a tunnel between King’s Cross and Russell Square left 21 people dead.

At 9.17am, seven people died after an explosion ripped through a tunnel wall at Edgware Road station, damaging three trains.

At 9.47am a blast tore the roof off of a red number 30 double decker bus packed with commuters forced above ground after the Tube network had been shut down.

Scotland Yard said two people were confirmed dead in the bus blast but eyewitnesses spoke of seeing more bodies.

The Queen will today visit people caught up in the bomb tragedy, while the Prime Minister was expected to return to London from Gleneagles after finishing talks on the final day of the G8 summit.

British Home Secretary Charles Clarke urged people to go about their business as normally as possible as transport staff attempted to resume normal services.

London Underground was operating a near-normal service, buses were expected to be fully back in action and all the main railway stations were open and running as usual, except King’s Cross.

Tony Blair learned of the devastation minutes after holding a joint news conference with his partner in the “war on terror”, US President George Bush.

After staging a show of unity with all those leaders present at the summit, he flew back to London to take charge of the crisis.

In a televised statement recorded in Downing Street, Mr Blair said: “It is through terrorism that the people that have committed these terrible acts express their values and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours.

“I think we all know what they are trying to do. They are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, trying to stop us from going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do and they should not and they must not succeed.

“When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country or our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed.”

The blasts were condemned by all the world leaders at the G8 summit as “barbaric”.

Mr Straw, speaking at Gleneagles, said that assessments were being made on the assumption that the attacks were committed by an al Qaida-linked organisation.

“It has the hallmarks of an al-Qaida-based organisation and also its ruthlessness,” he said.

On its website, the Secret Organisation Group of al-Qaida of Jihad Organisation in Europe stated: “O nation of Islam and nation of Arabism: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge from the British Zionist Crusader Government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The heroic mujahidin have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror, and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters.”

London was thrown into chaos in the wake of the blasts with shops, banks and offices closing and thousands of people left stranded on the streets as mainline stations were shut and Tube and bus services cancelled.

The blasts were initially blamed on a power surge but it soon became clear that it was a co-ordinated terrorist attack on the capital.

All London hospitals were put on major incident alert after the explosions. Neighbouring counties also sent emergency aid to the capital.

Metropolitan Police officers in Scotland for the G8 summit were urgently redeployed to London.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said: “There is no doubt it is a terrorist incident.”

He said the bomb which ripped through the bus in Tavistock Square had exploded in the “back of the upper part of the bus”.

He refused to confirm or deny reports that the explosion was the work of a suicide bomber.

Bus passenger Richard Jones, 61, an IT consultant, said he saw a man in his mid-20s on the bus become “extremely agitated”.

Mr Jones, who left the bus seconds before it exploded, told the Daily Mail: “This chap started dipping down into his bag and getting back up. He did it about a dozen times in two or three minutes and looked extremely agitated.”

In the wake of the Tube attacks, survivors gave harrowing accounts of the carnage, describing piles of bodies on wrecked trains.

A 42-year-old man wept as he described what happened on the Liverpool Street train.

Terry O’Shea, a construction worker from Worcester, said: “I was in the third carriage, the one behind the one where the explosion was.

“There was a loud bang and we felt the train shudder. Then smoke started coming in to the compartment. It was terrible. People were panicking, but they calmed down after one or two minutes.

“As they led us down the track past the carriage where the explosion was, we could see the roof was torn off it, and there were bodies on the track.”

Scotland Yard has issued a casualty hotline number in the UK on 0870 1566 344.