Susan Levy, 53, was named as a victim of the London bomb attack today - the first person to be formally identified by police. Up to 70 people may have been killed by the four bombs.

An inquest into the death of Mrs Levy, of Newgate Street Village, Cuffley, Hertfordshire, opened and adjourned at St Pancras Coroner’s Court in London at 10am.

A mother of two grown up sons, she was travelling on the Piccadilly Line on Thursday morning. Today her husband, Harry, a London taxi driver, issued a statement saying that he and his sons, James and Daniel, were distraught and devastated at their loss.

Later police identified Gladys Wundowa, 51, a university cleaner, as one of the 13 dead aboard the number 30 bus that exploded in Tavistock Square.

Detectives were continuing to identify individuals from the bodies, limbs, torsos and organs brought from the bomb sites, a task compared yesterday to assembling a giant jigsaw. It could be several weeks before all of the victims are known.

The job will be complicated because the dead may include at least one of the bombers, who was likely to be carrying false ID and to have relatives who are reluctant to come forward.

Already 100,000 calls have been made to the casualty bureau for the London bombings from people saying that they are concerned about missing friends and relatives.

An Identification Commission, chaired by Paul Knapman, the Coroner for Westminster, will meet daily to identify the dead. His team includes Rob Chapman, the supervising pathologist, Detective Superintendent Jim Dickie, the Metropolitan Police senior investigation manager, and a leading orthodontist.

The large number of bodies, their condition, the fact that all were retrieved from crime scenes and the possibility that they contain scraps of evidence will add to delays.

Police said that they were sharing information with families as clues emerged.

The remains have all been taken to a military site, the Honourable Artillery Company at City Road, London, close to King’s Cross. Large white tents have been erected in the grounds and police are standing guard. Post-mortem examinations began on Saturday.

When many bodies are in a mortuary at the same time, the authorities are aware of the danger of wrong identification through human error by overworked officials. This happened after the Lockerbie bombing when a body was wrongly sent to the United States. A similar blunder was prevented after the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster when a sharp-eyed pathologist spotted a wrong identity tag.

Identification by sight is rarely accepted by disaster investigators. Partly this is because it is so unreliable. But an expert, who declined to be named, said: "There are some religions that like to bury their dead before sundown. Experience in the Air India crash off Ireland suggests that people are so desperate to fulfil that religious belief they are rather haphazard in saying ‘That’s him or her’."

Those identifying victims of a mass killing must first study the bodies at the crime scene. They are photographed and checked to see if there are clues near by, such as weapons. The way in which a body has been damaged, the path taken by flying limbs or the site of burns or scorch marks, can all give clues to the location of a bomb.

The remains are gathered in individual plastic bags and taken to a mortuary, where post-mortem examinations take place. The bodies can contain clues in the form of shrapnel. After the bombing of the Deal barracks, which killed ten bandsmen in 1989, one of the corpses was discovered to have part of the timer used to detonate the device embedded in it.

Police collect details of all possible victims, which are then compared with the remains. The Coroner makes a list of a dozen or so indicators of identity. These might include belongings, tattoos, hysterectomies, artificial limbs or ethnicity.

Fingerprints and dental records are the traditional forms of identity, but DNA sampling has become the preferred method. In an explosion, investigators want to piece back together all the body parts and this can be done using DNA.

Samples can be retrieved from missing people’s clothing, hairbrushes and toothbrushes. If none is available, DNA can be taken from parents or relatives to find similarities in the genetic code.

Identity documents cannot be trusted because some people carry bogus papers.

One expert spoke last night of a case where a dead person turned out to have three identities "and a girl in every port".

The possible presence of bombers among the dead will complicate identification because a terrorist is likely to have false documents, or none.

One of the 31 victims of the King’s Cross fire of 1987 was identified by scientific methods only last year.

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