There has been loads of news relating to the London's terror attack yesterday, but this one from New York Times is a good read, An Umbrella in a Shower of a Million Bits That Had Been a Bus - New York Times.

I am very surprised that the British 'superior' intelligence of failing to detect/fore-see the impending terror act. The group who came up with this attack have indeed conducted an almost perfect job.

Who's responsible? Who might they be? Well, whoever they are, they are indeed terrorist! Dam*ed them, preying on innocent victims!

As a muslim. I would like to emphasise that this is NEVER an act of a Muslim who observes the correct teaching of the religion. There is a misconception that Islam tolerates the killing of innocents in their fight for the religion, by commiting terrorist acts, the religion is being spread by sword and it is a part of holy-war (jihad).

Killing of innocents is un-lawful in Islam as reflected by the ayat,

Wala taqtuloo annafsa allatee harrama Allahu illa bilhaqqi waman qutila mathlooman faqad jaAAalna liwaliyyihi sultanan fala yusrif fee alqatli innahu kana mansoora - [Al-Isra (The Journey by Night)- Ayat 33]

Click here to recite the ayat (Requires REAL Audio - Download the free-version here).

[Translation of 17:33] Nor take life - which Allah has made sacred - except for just cause. And if anyone is slain wrongfully, we have given his heir authority (to demand retaliation or to forgive): but let him not exceed bounds in the matter of taking life, for he is helped (by the Law)

A Muslim killing an innocent committs a grave sin, and should never be associated with the religion that is being professed. "Terrorism" and "Islam" can't ever be used in the same phrase!

On ending, terror acts are normally committed out of desperation, who-ever the terrorist are, be them the oppressed or the frustrated. However, if you could recall, in the 20th. James Bond movie, 'Die Another Day', (pDVD review01, 02, & 03) the character Raul (Emilio Echevarría) said 'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'.

July 8, 2005

An Umbrella in a Shower of a Million Bits That Had Been a Bus

By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, July 7 - The subway had been evacuated - in the chaos of the morning, 22-year-old Jasmine Gardner did not yet know why - so she did the next best thing. She decided to take the bus.

It was the No. 30 bus, a double-decker. Moving slowly in the heavy rush-hour traffic, it stopped at Upper Woburn Place and Tavistock Square, not far from the British Museum. It was packed. Ms. Gardner began to get on.

And then it exploded.

"One minute the bus was there; the next minute it seemed to dissolve into millions of pieces," Ms. Gardner, who works for a television distribution company, said. "I was showered with bits of metal and bits of the bus. I was shielding myself with my umbrella, and it all landed on my umbrella."

But the explosion was only one of four to strike central London on Thursday morning. The others took place deep inside the subway system, all within 30 minutes of one another, on three trains traveling in or out of some of the busiest stations in the city: Liverpool Street, King's Cross and Edgware Road. All the trains were crammed with commuters.

The first explosion struck at 8:51 on a Circle Line train going east through a tunnel between Aldgate and Liverpool Street subway stations, in London's financial district.

Witnesses described a scene of chaos, with bodies strewn on the tracks in the darkness and people staggering out of the stations, some with limbs blown off, others gasping for breath, covered in soot and with blood streaming down their faces.

Robert Andrews, who was on the train, said the explosion blew its doors off and left the roof a "twisted, mangled mess."

"We saw a flash and heard this massive bang," Mr. Andrews, a 28-year-old sales manager, told The Evening Standard. "Suddenly smoke and soot filled the carriage through the air vents." When he got off the train, he said, he saw two people lying on the tracks, one of them a man, face down with a jacket covering his head. It was not clear whether they were dead.

At first, looking at it from outside, it was unclear whether anything unusual had happened. The subway system in London is notoriously fickle, and trains often stop for no discernible reason, only to start up again. Sometimes the lights go out. Whole stations - and sometimes, whole lines - can be closed on account of suspicious bags and packages that turn out to be nothing. Transportation officials would say only that there had been an explosion, and that it had probably been caused by what they said was an electrical "power surge" on the line.

But soon hundreds of walking wounded began streaming out of three different subway stations, dazed, cut and bleeding, and it became evident that what had started as an ordinary morning, a little drizzly, a little muggy, was anything but.

"People started to scream because there was a burning smell, and everyone - to cut a long story short - thought they were going to die," one passenger, in shock, told reporters outside. He described how the carriage fell into total darkness, and how people broke windows with their bare hands to try to let air in, as passengers passed out and people got more and more panicked. They were trapped there for as long as half an hour before help came, he said.

The second explosion, on a Piccadilly Line train traveling southward between King's Cross and Russell Square, was the most serious - probably because that line is one of the deepest, making it much harder to reach. There were dozens injured and at least 21 reported dead. It took emergency workers hours to get to the train and clear the casualties out.

The third explosion, on a train about 100 yards outside of the Edgware Road station, was so powerful that it blew through a wall and blasted through another train on a nearby track.

"A ball of fire came in and everyone started shouting," one passenger, a woman, told reporters outside. "People were screaming and wailing, 'People are dying in here; help us, help us.' "

By the time the fourth attack took place, on the No. 30 bus, there was little doubt that this was an organized effort designed to inflict maximum damage and distress. And although the bus explosion was not the most serious in terms of casualties, to the people above ground it was the most shocking.

The force of the explosion sheared off the top half of the bus, leaving it looking like an opened sardine can, its seats exposed to the air. Hours later, blood and bits of metal and glass were still splattered across the road, and the headquarters of the British Medical Association, an imposing Victorian building across the street, was still covered in blood.

"The scene was just carnage," said Tony Tindall, an Australian construction worker who lives in London. He was around the corner when the explosion took place and came to within 50 feet of the damaged bus . "There was blood and guts everywhere, washing all over the pavement and spattered all over the walls of the buildings nearby."

"I saw bodies everywhere and bits of bodies," Mr. Tindall continued in an interview, describing how one man was hanging out of the back of the bus and another seemed to be cut in two. "It was so mixed up I couldn't work out how many were dead. There were big bits of people. And the whole of the top of the bus had disappeared."

A large area was soon cordoned off, and no one - not people who had left their cars nearby, and not people staying in the many local hotels, which had suddenly become inaccessible - was allowed in.

Although shaken and scared, many Londoners seemed to take the bombings in stride, or at least to want to take them in stride. Londoners are no strangers to terror blasts, after all, having endured three decades of bombings by the Irish Republican Army.

Stores and offices closed early, and thousands of people walked calmly home through the streets, even as sirens sounded far off in the distance. The emergency services, which have had held countless practice drills to prepare for such an event, swung smoothly into action. Schools closed and the children were sent home.

Although the subway system remained completely closed, by the end of the day bus service had been restored to much of central London, and all the railroad stations - many of them sharing hubs with the affected subway stations, such as Liverpool Street - had been reopened.

Heather Timmons and Stephen Grey contributed reporting for this article.

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