A 39-year-old Israeli woman who had a fear of bus bombs in her home country got on the Number 30 bus in London moments before it exploded on Thursday and is feared dead, her fiancee said.
Anat Rosenberg, who had lived in London for 18 years, called her partner John Falding after emerging from the London Underground to tell him she had just taken the bus and was lucky enough to find a seat.
"I just heard screaming, and the mobile went dead," Falding said in an interview played on BBC TV on Sunday.
"She had this phobia about bus bombing in Israel. And she put off visiting Israel, where her parents live, because she feared getting on a bus in Israel. And the irony is that this happened here, in our only bus bombing. It's just incredible," he said.
Meanwhile a London Underground driver who saw a bomb explode on a subway train next to his during last week's attacks said yesterday that he feels like "the luckiest man alive."
Jeff Porter told BBC TV he was driving his Circle Line train into the Edgware Road station on Thursday morning when a bomb detonated, destroying a train heading in the opposite direction and shattering his windshield.
"As the driver's cab was just passing mine, I saw a bright yellow light on the train on the other side. It was like it happened in slow motion in my mind. As the other train passed me, my windscreen shattered. There was smoke and dust everywhere," Porter said.
He began evacuating his passengers, one of whom recorded the confusion with his cellphone, capturing Porter shouting, "Stay calm!"
"If it had been a second later that the explosion happened, I wouldn't be here speaking to you. We were so lucky the blast happened when it did ... because the casualty numbers would have been doubled," Porter said.
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