“We started hearing some really bad, bloodcurdling screaming from somewhere further down the train. A message was passed along asking if anyone medically qualified was on board. There wasn’t.

“Railway staff ushered us out of the back of the train; they were just saying that the power was off. We had to walk along the track. I saw two bodies outside the train, next to large chunks of metal.

“We walked past the carriage where the explosion was. The roof was damaged and metal panels had come off: it looked as if the side had been blown off. I think injured people may have still been on board.”

Hector Pantoja, 50, a postgraduate student from Mexico, heard the Russell Square bus explosion a few seconds before he turned the corner.

“The first thing I saw was a woman whose face was covered in blood. She was being escorted by a man away from the wreckage but neither of them were panicking at all.

“The bus looked as if it had been cut in half by the force of the blast, the back end of its roof had been blown back.

“I saw the body of one man, about 50 years old I think. He looked as if he had been burnt completely and must have been blown from the top of the bus. About 10ft from where I stood was a lump of flesh. I think it was part of somebody’s leg.”

Louise is a homeless woman who sleeps at Aldgate tube station every night.

“I was lying there asleep when I was woken by the crashing noise of what could only have been a bomb. Then there was a frightening silence that went on for about five minutes before the screaming started. Soon people started running up the stairs towards me from the platform.

“It was like a scene from a disaster film with smoke smelling of chemicals billowing from below and people, mostly in suits, elbowing each other out of the way, literally trampling each other to get out. They were shouting ‘get out of my way’, and ‘another one is going to go off’, and coming up from the platform with blood and soot over their faces. Nobody was helping each other, the surival instinct was too strong I suppose. I will never travel on the tube again.”

Lorenzo Pia, an Italian postgraduate student at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, was on his way to catch a bus.

“The bus was without shape. 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 weren’t moving.

“One of the injured was a young teenage girl who had blood streaming down her face. Another was an elegantly dressed man who 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.”

Sandra Pollins saw the bus explosion in Russell Square.

“I was just walking along the street; everybody had been evacuated off the Tube and the streets were very busy. All of a sudden there was a tremendous bang. There was glass flying. Everybody ran for cover in a shop doorway.

“It took a minute or two to compose ourselves, then we came out. I could not even recognise that it was a bus. The whole roof had been blown off. There were people just walking around with blood all over their faces. People were lying on the ground, just staggering off that bus in a complete state. One woman I spoke to said she could not hear anything any more, her partner was still on the bus.”

Ayobami Bello, 46, a security guard at the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine, described seeing bodies lying in the street after the bus bomb.

“It was terrible. The bus went to pieces. There were so many bodies on the floor. The back was completely gone; it was blown off completely and a dead body was hanging out and there were dead bodies on the road — it was a horrible thing.

“I can’t believe it, I can’t even believe I survived it.”

Fiona Trueman, 26, was on a Piccadilly Line train a few minutes south of King’s Cross.

“I had taken a Thameslink train from St Albans, where I live, to King’s Cross, and changed to the Underground there. The train before was really busy and I thought of squeezing on to it, but didn’t. Now I wish I had.

“It was about three minutes after we left King’s Cross when there was a massive bang and there was smoke and glass everywhere. I was standing near a window, and I’ve still got some in my hair.

“The lights went out and with the smoke we couldn’t breathe. We sort of cushioned each other during the impact because the compartment was so full. It felt like a dream, it was surreal. I was in the second carriage and I think the explosion was in the carriage in front of me, or maybe even on the track, and the screaming from the front carriage was terrible.

“It was just horrendous. It was like a disaster movie. You can’t imagine being somewhere like that, you just want to get out. I kept closing my eyes and thinking of outside. It was frightening because all the lights had gone out and we didn’t hear anything from the driver, so we wondered how he was.

“Some people were very calm and were telling everybody not to panic, and after a few minutes we started to get messages that we would be unloaded from the back of the train and walked to safety. It took about 15 minutes to walk along the track to King’s Cross.”

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