Smash hit

She said that the first hours after the accident, when information about the missing and the dead was impossible to come by, had been “hell on earth”. “We were literally shouting down every camera lens we could find to see if anybody had seen him.”

She said that Ms Nash and Mr Gordon had planned to get married in the next few years. “They hadn’t set a date but they were looking at rings. Yvonne’s one of the strongest women I have ever met and she will pull through this but it will take time.”

Like Mr Gordon, Mr Russell, who lived in southwest London and would have been 29 on Monday, called his work colleagues shortly before boarding the No 30 bus. He told staff at JP Morgan in Moorgate that he was running late because Euston Tube station had been evacuated.

Mr Russell’s parents had been waiting by the phone at their home in East Peckham, Kent, desperate for any information but dreading the news they received yesterday.

His father Grahame described him as a wonderful kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He added: “I am totally grief stricken and overtaken by shock. I can’t put into words how I am feeling.”

Fifty-two people are now known to have died in the London blasts and 31 have been reported missing.

Susan Levy, a mother of two from Cuffley, Hertfordshire, was the first of the five confirmed victims to be named on Monday. She remains the only known casualty of the bombs that ripped through three London Underground trains just under an hour before the bus blast.

A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said: “Other bodies have been identified but have yet to be formally identified by their families.”

Fifty-five bomb victims are still in hospital. The Royal London in Whitechapel, a few hundred yards from the Aldgate Tube bomb, has 15 blast patients, seven of them in intensive care.

Fourteen patients are left in University College Hospital in Bloomsbury, close to the scene of the bus bomb and the Piccadilly line explosion that killed Ms Levy. Five of those patients are in intensive care.

Seventy-four family liaison officers have now been deployed to relatives’ homes including, unusually, the relatives of critically ill patients.

Tony Blair yesterday signed a book of condolence for the victims of the bombings at London’s City Hall.

The Prime Minister wrote: “With deep condolences for all those who lost their lives and for their families who mourn and with heart-felt admiration for London, the greatest capital city in the world.”

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