Scotland Yard Appeals to Public in Its Inquiry

Across this grieving city on an incongruously sunny Sunday, church bells tolled and religious leaders prayed for calm as work crews pulled bodies from the wreckage of bombed subway cars crushed deep beneath the ground.

The investigation into the bloodiest terrorist attack on British soil and the hunt for its perpetrators proceeded “with great vigor,” authorities said Sunday. But they remained tight-lipped about any progress. Among other elements, investigators were attempting to determine whether the suspected Islamic extremists who blew up three Underground trains and a double-decker bus were British-born or immigrants, and whether they had ties to foreign terrorist cells.

Scotland Yard’s Brian Paddick said police acting under Britain’s anti-terrorism laws had arrested three men early Sunday at Heathrow Airport. He refused, however, to describe them as suspects in the synchronized bombings that killed at least 49 people and wounded 700. Early today, the three men were released without charge, Associated Press reported.

Scotland Yard detectives also issued an urgent appeal for members of the public to e-mail to the police images from their mobile telephones taken on the morning of the attacks, as well as any other photographs or videotapes taken near the bomb sites.

At the square where the bus exploded, the investigators expanded the radius of their search, going by hand over every inch of nearby streets, sidewalks and parked cars, some of which were damaged in the blast.

John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police chief in London until his retirement this year, said Sunday that he believed the bombers were “almost certainly” born and raised in Britain. It is thought, he said, that 3,000 British citizens or residents have trained in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

“I’m afraid there’s a sufficient number of people in this country willing to be Islamic terrorists that they don’t have to be drafted in from abroad,” Stevens wrote in the News of the World.

Police have refused to comment on several people named in news reports as potential suspects.

But President Bush’s homeland security advisor, Fran Townsend, said Sunday that British and American authorities were looking for Mustafa Setmarian, a Syrian alleged to be a key Al Qaeda operative in Europe and mastermind of last year’s Madrid train bombings.

“He has been a longtime and well-known bad-guy terrorist, and involved in terrorist circles,” Townsend said on “Fox News Sunday.” “The fact is, we and the British authorities are working very hard together to try and locate him and question him.”

Adding to public unease, British Home Secretary Charles Clarke warned Sunday of additional terrorism if the suspects were not found and arrested.

“Our fear is, of course, of more attacks until we succeed in tracking down the gang which committed the atrocities on Thursday,” Clarke told the BBC. “And that’s why the No. 1 priority ... has to be the catching of the perpetrators.”

Church leaders used their Sunday pulpits to mourn the dead and urge calm. Representatives of four faiths -- a Roman Catholic cardinal, an Anglican bishop, a chief rabbi and a Muslim imam -- issued a joint statement condemning the attacks as the work of a minority that does not represent Islam.

“It is vital,” said Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, “that with many people feeling anger and bewilderment, [they] resist those things which drive us apart.”

Since the attacks, two mosques in Britain have burned in arson fires and a third has been covered in anti-Muslim graffiti. At a fourth mosque near the Aldgate Underground station, close to the site of one of the bombings, 17 windows were broken overnight, officials of the Islamic community said.

Led by their queen, meanwhile, Londoners made a determined show of returning to normal.

Sunday was the culmination of ceremonies marking the end of World War II 60 years ago, and the memories of suffering and fortitude inevitably took on new meaning after last week’s attacks.

Amid pageantry under brilliantly sunny skies, tens of thousands of people crowded into St. James Park and along the Mall to watch a parade of marching bands and white-haired war veterans in their 70s and 80s, their chests bristling with medals.

Queen Elizabeth saluted the generation that had fought and endured the war, saying its sacrifices had not been made in vain and that it inspired citizens today.

“It does not surprise me that during the present difficult days for London, people turn to the example set by that generation, of resilience, humor, sustained courage, often under conditions of great deprivation,” she said.

Later, after riding pointedly in an open-topped car, she and other members of the royal family waved from the balcony of Buckingham Palace as World War II vintage aircraft flew over and dropped a million bright red paper poppies on Londoners gathered for the commemoration.

But four subway stops away, deep underground in a dank tunnel, recovery crews continued picking through the wreckage of the train that had suffered the greatest damage in Thursday’s attacks. By Sunday afternoon, 21 bodies had been pulled from the site between King’s Cross Station and Russell Square, police said, and the crews were searching for additional victims, possibly crushed beneath the carriage.

“As the searchers cut through the carriages, there may be more [corpses] underneath,” Andy Trotter, assistant chief constable of the British Transport Police, said. “We hope and pray [there aren’t], but that may be the case.”

Five teams of workers are taking turns climbing into the tunnel nearly around the clock, Trotter said. Temperatures there have reached 140 degrees, there is no air circulation, and the workers are exposed to rats and the odor of decomposing flesh.

Trotter said 49 people had been confirmed dead and 49 bodies had been recovered, including the 21 from the Piccadilly train line. But he also said police had designated death-counseling teams for 59 cases, suggesting that a higher death toll was expected.

British police have been tight-lipped about even basic details and have refused to clarify discrepancies in the numbers of dead and missing.

Police representatives have begun collecting from some families material such as hairbrushes for DNA matches with victims. One family told The Times that investigators had been able to trace their missing daughter’s cellphone by its last call to a site where she would have boarded the doomed double-decker bus.