The police and security services were last night pinning their hopes for an early breakthrough in their search for the perpetrators of Thursday's attacks in London on evidence from the shattered number 30 bus and its passengers, both living and dead.
It was reported last night that Britain's security alert had been raised to its highest level - "severe specific" alert - by the joint terrorist analysis centre. The upgrading makes it clear that the security services believe that the perpetrators of the attack are still at large.
Officials indicated that the three synchronised bombs on the underground were placed by individuals who then fled, leading to a warning from the home secretary, Charles Clarke, of possible further attacks as the total of dead was expected to reach 60.
The key to the investigation is now seen to lie in the bomb on the bus, which went off about an hour after the underground Explosions, killing 13 passengers as the bus passed through Tavistock Square. Police are now almost certain the tube bombs were not suicide attacks, but were positioned at the doors of carriages before the perpetrators got off.
Among the theories being examined about the bus bomb yesterday is that it may have been a deliberate tactic to cause maximum mayhem as those fleeing the tube boarded buses. Another theory is that the device went off by accident as the bomber tried to make his way to another target.
Police sources said they could not rule out that the bomber may be among the dead, who have not been formally identified.
A number of passengers and the bus driver survived the blast, and detectives will interview them in the hope that they can provide clues, all the more so as the CCTV camera on the bus was not working.
Police will examine hundreds of thousands of hours of CCTV footage from tube stations and street cameras all over London today in the hope this could yield pictures of the bombers. But this will be a long process because they have not yet established which stations the bombers used. Scotland Yard set up a special email address for witnesses to send mobile phone and video footage and photographs of the scenes to detectives at images@met.police.uk.
There have already been 1,700 calls to the confidential anti-terrorist hotline, some of which, police said, contained important information.
Specialists from 30 countries are assisting the Metropolitan police in their investigation. Spanish police have brought with them information about how the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people were carried out last March.
Security sources said they were keeping an open mind about who was responsible.
One person under scrutiny yesterday was Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a Syrian linked to the Madrid bombers and now said to be in Iraq, who was reported to have set up a "sleeper cell" in London.
A Spanish-nationalised Syrian who lived in north London from 1995 to 1998, Nasar was described by the chief prosecutor in the Madrid bombings case as a suspect in the "initiation, preparation and carrying out" of the attacks. Tall, red-haired, pale-skinned and green-eyed, Nasar, according to Spanish police, has been able to travel without raising suspicion.
Security sources said they were pursuing a number of individuals. "No one name has risen to the top of the heap. They are all being looked at, all given equal weighting," a senior anti-terrorist official told the Guardian.
The former commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Lord Stevens, said yesterday that he believed the people who had carried out the attacks were "British born and bred, brought up here and totally aware of British life and values". He dismissed suggestions, both by security sources and in the media, that the terrorists were possibly Algerian or Moroccan.
Lord Stevens, writing in the News of the World, said he believed that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama bin Laden's training camps. Of these, he believed that there were now about 200 committed "home-grown terrorists willing and able to slaughter innocents for their perverted view of Islam".
Lord Stevens said that eight planned attacks had been thwarted in the past five years. On one occasion, he said, 1,000 undercover Metropolitan police officers had been deployed to watch suspected terrorists believed to be about to carry out an attack.
"No one can say Lord Stevens is right or wrong," a senior intelligence official said.
Intelligence sources described a "very small number of inner-core al-Qaida people" in Britain consisting of 30 or so members, with several hundred who have been to training camps or have fought in Afghanistan, Bosnia or Chechnya. They also referred to a third group of "home-grown" radicalised Britons not linked to the other groups and therefore difficult to investigate and know about.
A joint Home Office and Foreign Office report, Young Muslims and Extremism, said Britain might now be harbouring thousands of al-Qaida sympathisers.
Forensic pathologists have begun the process of identifying the dead at a temporary mortuary set up in a military barracks in the City of London, but because many of the victims were so badly injured in the blasts formal identification may take some time. Names of the dead will not be publicly released until the legal identification process through the coroner has taken place.
Police arrested three British men returning from the US at Heathrow early yesterday morning, but a senior Scotland Yard source said they had been picked up at the airport after being turned back by the US authorities and were not believed to have had anything to do with the bombings. They were later released without charge.
A security alert which led to the evacuation of 20,000 people from Birmingham city centre on Saturday was said yesterday by senior police sources not to be connected to the London attacks.
Mr Clarke warned that the terrorists could strike again. "Our fear is, of course, of more attacks until we succeed in tracking down the gang that committed the atrocities on Thursday," he said.
It also emerged yesterday that friends and relatives of the missing are being charged up to 40p a minute when they call the police casualty bureau.
More than 100,000 people have called the 0870 number since Thursday's attacks hoping for news of their missing loved ones. The calls cost up to 10p a minute from landlines and 40p from mobiles.
The telecoms regulator Ofcom yesterday criticised the use of the 0870 number for the hotline, describing it as "inappropriate". Ofcom said its guidelines stated that public service bodies should be wary of using the code, both because of the costs to callers and because the number could not always be accessed by people calling from abroad.
It was announced over the weekend that a two-minute silence is to be held at 1pm this Thursday to remember those dead and injured.
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