ondon calmly picked itself up from Thursday's terrorist attacks and began to count the corpses yesterday, its citizens and leaders embarked on the far more difficult task of finding an explanation amid the chaos and wreckage.
Some searched for forensic answers.
With bodies still buried in the deepest of the tube tunnels hit by explosions, and flesh still hanging from the bombed-out double-decker bus, the evidence was slow coming. But it was apparent that the attacks were the work of several individuals simultaneously, that at least 50 people were killed, and that the blasts were caused by plastic-explosive "parcel bombs" placed on the floors of the subway cars and the bus.
Others sought more political explanations in the sooty depths.
Since London police acknowledged that the blasts were almost certainly the work of a London-based radical Islamist cell, many saw the attack as a violent broadside by forces of religious intolerance against the famously plural, tolerant culture of the city. The Queen declared, and the city's left-wing mayor agreed, that "they will not change our way of life."
Others took an almost evangelical tone, declaring that the political sinners of Britain had only themselves to blame, for having sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan and for having disobeyed the commands of Osama bin Laden.
Amidst this debate, the ugly work of clearing bodies continued. The Piccadilly Line, more than 21 metres below the ground under King's Cross station, still contained uncounted bodies and the twisted wreckage of a train, police said last night. Its tunnel was on the verge of collapse, forcing investigators to withdraw from the carriage for hours while the roof was reinforced, and officials said it could be days before a body count was complete.
That count had officially reached 49 last night, but London's Metropolitan Police Chief, Sir Ian Blair, acknowledged that it would definitely reach higher than that. The Russell Square bus bombing now has 13 official victims, up from only two yesterday, though its body count is also not complete.
The slow increment of the tally was a measure of the degree of destruction -- many bodies were blown into small pieces -- and of the painstaking nature of the forensic work. The bombers must have left the scene only seconds before the blasts, police believe, and in the case of the bus may have died in the explosion.
This has slowed the process, to the frustration of many Londoners seeking their missing loved ones or hoping for a final tally of the dead.
Police also realized that the bombs had likely gone off within a few minutes of each other. Films of the attacks made by many passengers on their mobile phones indicate that the three Underground blasts probably occurred between 8:50 and 8:56 in the morning, making it clear they were carried out by an organized group of individuals rather than a single person.
Police also said it was unlikely any of the blasts were the work of suicide bombers, although the bus explosion may have killed its bomber inadvertently.
The evidence-gathering task became the largest in British history, as police and intelligence agents pored over the human remains, the plastic-explosive remnants, and the hundreds of hours of videotape that had been captured in a city containing more surveillance cameras than any place on Earth.
Mr. Blair, the police chief, conceded the attacks were an embarrassment after Britain had suspended some civil liberties and engaged in mass arrests and deportations in its efforts to prevent Islamist bombings.
"It certainly was a failure of intelligence in the sense that we didn't know this was coming," he told reporters yesterday.
But, in a larger sense, many Londoners acknowledged they did know such an attack was coming. For many, it was an inevitable confrontation between an extremist movement and a society whose government had fought its principles at home and abroad.
Some scholars refer to London as the "de facto capital of the Middle East," because the city has been so thoroughly colonized by its former subjects and has fallen into the very centre of the debates over religious versus secular societies that have consumed the region.
