London officials publishes report about last July bombings

Photo: London officials publishes report about last July bombings

London officials publishes report about last July bombings

The London Assembly's report highlights both the heroism and the confusion of emergency crews responding to the bombs, which killed 52 commuters and four bombers and left about 700 people injured.

One of several inquiries into the attacks, the report describes how rescuers' phones and radios failed, and some hospitals relied on staff running to and from bomb sites to gather information.

The report includes harrowing testimony by survivors, who gave evidence to London Assembly politicians at a series of private and public sessions.

The 700-page report makes about 50 recommendations for improvements to emergency response procedures.

The report said hundreds of people were left to wander away from the scenes of the four explosions with little or no effort to identify them. The report estimated that 1,000 adults and twice as many children had suffered from post-traumatic stress, but few of those had been identified by authorities.

Survivors said they would continue to press for a full public inquiry into the bombings. They say evidence heard by the assembly and released in two separate British government reports falls short of the standard set by the commission into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

"This is the only public interrogation so far of any of the evidence, and it has turned up a huge number of problems with planning and resources," said Rachel North, 35, who survived the subway bombing near Russell Square station, which killed 26 people.

Survivors reject the government's claim that a public inquiry would divert too many resources away from counterterrorism work and would likely match the scale of the Bloody Sunday inquiry, a seven-year, 150 million pound (US$280million; Ђ218 million) probe into the 1972 killing in northern Ireland of Catholic demonstrators by British soldiers.

North said survivors were holding meetings with Home Secretary John Reid and hoped to convince him a 9/11 commission-style inquiry was viable.