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I've been hearing a few dark facts about the bus bomb. Apparently a guy who survived the blast said he had seen another male passenger (who he thinks was the bomber) who kept fiddling in his bag. The witness said the guy must have put his hands in the bag at least fourteen times in the space of their short journey and the witness said this seemed odd at the time. However, the witness didn't have a scratch on him and I figured that was odd seeing as he must have been sitting close to the supposed "bomber" to note that he was messing around with his luggage. That said, the initial photographs after the explosion show people standing on the top deck in a daze with no obvious signs of injury.
Apparently, the bus was on diversion (containing some passengers who should have been on the tube), that the driver pulled over to ask two traffic-wardens for directions and this was when the bomb was detonated. This made me think that the bomber was probably already panicking (i.e. the bag fiddling, and also because of the diversion) saw the two men in uniform and may have triggered the bomb by mistake.
It was while I was thinking about this that two of my friends arrived at my place last night to ask me if they could leave their canine companion, Leela, in my care for the evening. They both live just off Tottenham Court Road and I'd been worried as I hadn't heard from them. To my horror, they began to tell me their stories of the day, and turns out that the female half of the couple had been only seconds away from the bus bomb, as she was heading for Tavistock Square to take Leela for a walk, as they do every morning. She said she'd started out from their flat then felt weird as though she'd left the gas on, so turned back to go home and check. After leaving the house for the second time, she was waiting at a traffic lights and noted how loads of emergency vehicles were zooming around and slowing the traffic. That was when she heard the explosion. Instinctively, she bent down and scooped up Leela in her arms, but she said the blast sounded more like a scaffolding beam being dropped from a great height. Indeed, she was in half a mind to tell off the nearest labourer (of which there were none in sight, of course) for being so inconsiderate. She said that she still felt weird but headed off for Tavistock Square as per usual. And this is where it gets nasty. My friend said that as she turned into the square she saw a traffic warden lying flat on his back in the middle of the green with another warden standing next to him with a look of bewilderment on his face. His eyes met my friend's and that was when she knew something was horribly wrong. As other passers-by gathered around the wardens, my my friend decided to get the hell out of there. On her way home she began to cry as the shock hit her, but (God love her) she still managed to have a go at a bunch of Scientologists (re: the Inappropriate Response Thread) who were handing out leaflets amid the panic and (in her words) "milking the situation".
I've heard many people saying things like "I could have been on that bus, etc", but this is the closest any of my loved ones came to disaster. F**king scary. If she hadn't returned home before going back out to walk Leela...... |
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