Yesterday?s carnage hit home for one transplanted Londoner who heard that two former colleagues were fighting for their lives following the blasts.

Englishwoman Wendie Teppett, who has been working in Bermuda for three months at Evoke, said staff from her old advertising agency near Tavistock Square were in critical condition.

One man had been on the train from King?s Cross to Russell Square, the other had been on the number 30 bus which blew up near Tavistock square.

Another former co-worker had also been put in hospital from the blast.

She said: ?Now I am just waiting for news, there is not a lot you can do.?

Ms Teppett spent yesterday morning making frantic calls to check on family and friends back in London but faced a battle with communications down and people displaced.

Eventually she made contact with her 18-year-old son, who nonchalantly told her he was fine but, later she found out her ex-husband had suffered minor injuries while travelling on the tube when a bomb went off on another train at Liverpool Street station.

Worryingly, she had still to hear from other friends and colleagues.

She said the threat of a tragedy was always in the back of her mind having missed the 1987 King?s Cross fire disaster, which killed 31, by two trains.

?I was in London when we had the IRA bombing,? she said. ?The difference is they would communicate with Police with coded warnings so people were able to get away. They were trying to make a point and didn?t want to hurt anybody.

?This is something else. How anybody could do it and justify it beggars belief.

?I have to say, having lived in London for 20 years you will be surprised how people will react. We went through the IRA bombings and the blitz and bounced back.?

She said it was hard being away from home when this was going on. ?I might sound morbid but I would rather be there, so I can check friends are OK.

?Just like after September 11 ? we all piled around to a friend?s house to be together.?

Bermudian Adam Cooper had a lucky escape from yesterday?s carnage when he opted to go to work uncharacteristically early and passed through bomb-hit King?s Cross ten to 15 minutes earlier than normal on his way to his office above Charing Cross station.

Minutes later a bomb ripped open a train killing 21 people.

?It is a sobering thought,? he said.

Mr. Cooper, a management consultant with PWC, has lived in London for a year. He said he was not surprised by the attack, which had paralysed transport and left him with an hour?s walk home.

?They are telling everyone to go home but I have a lot of work to do, so I will stay.?

But it won?t deter him from living in London although he said his parents, who are in town for a visit, might have other ideas.

?It takes a lot for me be scared,? Mr. Cooper said. ?I will live life as normal.?

Former journalist Raymond Hainey works in Tavistock Square as PR Officer and normally walks the last bit to work, just yards from where the bus was ripped apart, at about the same time.

?Luckily I took the week off and am in Scotland,? he said yesterday. ?I normally walk past about ten to nine. It?s an eerie feeling. I am seeing faces on the TV that I recognise.

?I know that area very well. It?s frightening they can do that.?

He said the area is full of tourists heading to the British Museum and colleges including the School of Oriental and African Studies at that time of day.

?Russell Square is extremely busy,? he said. ?Targeting innocent people, students, many of them foreign ? a huge lot from third world countries ? where is the sense in killing them? It is absolutely unbelievable.?

Mr. Hainey believed the bomb was in reaction to the Olympic Games being given to London with the terrorists putting the capital on notice about the havoc they could later wreak.

?The bottom line is for years we had all sorts of terrorist activity,? he said. ?In a sense we are used to it.?

Bomb scares continued throughout the day in London.

Bermudian lawyer Stephanie Henderson, who works near Liverpool Street station in London, said: ?We had a bomb scare at about noon just outside our building which is very close to Liverpool Street station and we were all evacuated from our desks away from the windows to the centre of the building for about 30 minutes until the bomb squad gave us the all clear.

?There were security alerts announcing that it was unsafe to leave the building and at one point we thought we would be in here overnight.?

Eventually most staff left on foot due to the transport shutdown.

Bermudian journalist Winifred Blackmore has been living in England for 16 years and was unscathed by the blasts which had reduced London to a virtual ghost town by yesterday evening with pubs and late night shops all shut.

She said: ?It?s very quiet. The only people out are the tourists. They are still going on buses which is kind of sweet. They are probably safe now.?

She predicted people would avoid using the tube for a while. ?Then they will go back to using them because they can?t be asked to do anything else,? she said.

Former US Senate House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is in Bermuda this week, said the outrage showed anywhere connected by plane or ship was vulnerable in an age of terrorism ? even here.

He listed terrorist targets which included European cities, Pakistan, the Philippines and Indonesia.

He said of the latest attack: ?It was terrible having just watched London celebrating getting the Olympics yesterday to seeing human pain today. It reflects the challenge we have to defeat terrorism. It threatens all of us.?