Search For Answers In London

Four Blasts In Subways, Bus Kill At Least 37, Injure 700

(CBS/AP) 
The first blast caught a subway train between Moorgate and Liverpool Street stations, on the eastern fringe of London's financial district. Seven died, police said. Moorgate is named for one of the gates in the city walls of London, of which few traces remain. Some people caught in the blast emerged from the Aldgate Station, near Jack the Ripper's old haunts in Whitechapel.

The second bombing came five minutes later, on a second train deep underground between the King's Cross and Russell Square stations. Police said 21 died. King's Cross station, in one of the seediest parts of London, is the film setting for Platform 9@3/4 in the Harry Potter films. Russell Square station serves Bloomsbury, the early 20th-century literary hotbed where Virginia Woolf and luminaries lived.

At 9:17 a.m., there was an explosion involving two or perhaps three trains around Edgware Road station. Seven people were killed, police said. Edgware Road is the heart of a thriving Arab community, and convenient to Hyde Park, scene of last weekend's Live 8 concert.

The bus explosion, which killed at least two people, took place near Russell Square, an area of many modestly priced hotels popular with tourists. Also nearby is the home where Charles Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839.

"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," Belinda Seabrook told the Press Association news agency. She said the bus was packed with people.

"It was a massive explosion and there were papers and half a bus flying through the air," she said.

Police said they had received no claim of responsibility. An Arabic-language news Web site said a group calling itself "Secret Organization — al Qaeda in Europe" had posted a claim on an Islamic Web site.

"The attack has all the trademarks of the al Qaeda network," said security expert Paul Wilkinson of St. Andrews University in Scotland.

In Washington, a senior counterterrorism official said the claim is considered "potentially very credible" because it appeared on a Web site that in the past has been used for extremist postings, the message appeared soon after the attacks and doesn't appeared hurried or rushed.

The whole of Europe was in a state of alert Thursday. Transportation systems in major U.S. cities also were ordered to be vigilant.

President Bush (video) said in Scotland that Americans offered their "heartfelt condolences."

"The war on terror goes on," he said. "We will not yield to these people, we will not yield to the terrorists."

The U.S. raised the terror alert level to orange – or "high" – for trains and other mass transit system, but not airlines. Homeland Defense Secretary Michael Chertoff said there was "no specific, credible information" suggesting an attack in the U.S. was imminent.

Mayor Ken Livingstone, in Singapore for London's successful Olympic bid, called the blasts "mass murder" carried out by terrorists bent on indiscriminate slaughter.

"I want to say one thing: This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty or the powerful, it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers, it was aimed at ordinary working-class Londoners," he told reporters.

In Scotland, the leaders of the G-8 countries – the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia – planned to proceed with discussions on the issues of global warming and African poverty that Blair has made the centerpiece of the gathering.

"All of our countries have suffered from the impact of terrorism," Blair said in a statement on the leaders' behalf. "Those responsible have no respect for human life."