The driver stopped to let a few people off, but did not let anyone on. Why? The bus was not full. Jasmine, 22, walked alongside, irritated, and the bus pulled ahead. She was walking briskly, intent on catching it, when it exploded. Bits of metal rained on her umbrella, a stormcloud of debris, solids and flesh, filled the air.

It was 9.47am. A bomber had struck. She grabbed the person closest and they ran. The bus had been destroyed. “I thought that everyone must have died.” It did not take long before she realised how close she had come to disaster. When I interviewed her, she was still shaking, wrapped in a blue St John Ambulance blanket.

No one knew how many had died on the bus but everyone assumed the worst. Richard Jones, 61, a passenger, recalled an agitated man he described as “suspicious”. He said: “This chap started dipping down into his bag and getting back up, then dipping down and getting back up. He was getting more and more frustrated. He did it about a dozen times in two or three minutes and looked extremely agitated. He was fiddling away but he was getting annoyed with something.”

The IT consultant got off the bus at Woburn Square. Only seconds later it exploded. “I don’t know whether the man had anything to do with it, but he was acting very strangely.”

Terence Mutasa, a nurse at University College Hospital, treated two passengers, women in their twenties, for injuries and shock. “They were saying some guy came and sat down on the bottom deck and that he exploded,” he said. “They said the guy sat down and the explosion happened. They thought it was a suicide bomber.”

The police had cordoned off the square but, even at a distance, you could see the elegant façade of the British Medical Association splattered with bits of blood and bodies. “Blood and guts,” whispered a man.

Lorenzo Pia, an Italian postgraduate medical student, was leaving his nearby flat when he heard the blast. “The bus was without shape,” he said. “Four or five injured people were walking about. They were dripping with blood, some from the head, others from legs and arms. Five or six people were lying in the street. They were not moving.

“One of the injured was a young teenage girl who had blood streaming down her face. Another, an elegantly dressed man, had a leg injury. A woman was crying. She had blood down her face too, but there wasn’t any panic or screaming. People just got on with helping each other.”

Sharleen Cunningham-Brown, 26, was walking when she heard, and felt, the impact of the bomb. She saw people, presumed dead, on the pavement. She ran into a doorway and hugged the strangers she found there. “Everyone was crying and hugging each other,” she said. “It was like it was chaos and then, a few seconds later, it was quiet.”

Ayobai Bello, 43, a security guard, left his bank to cross Tavistock Road when he saw the explosion and the top and back ripped off the bus. It was a scene of carnage. “All I could think was, they are all dead. In front of me in the road was a woman, but there were no arms and there were no legs, it was just her body and her head, and body parts were scattered everywhere.

“There were also two men on the floor, one in blue trousers and one in a shirt. They were both dead. They were both gone. The man I saw hanging dead from the bus, he was a very old man with white hair. He was about 80.” Hours later, in the streets around the bus, the atmosphere was eerie.

Looking at the bus, from behind the police cordon, I knew that in a matter of hours it would become a shrine.

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