ISRAEL: A schoolbag full of pink workbooks lay in the debris of a Jerusalem bus ripped apart by a Palestinian suicide bombing, wrenched from the hands of a student whose trip to class was violently cut short.
One of the 11 killed by the bomber at the height of morning rush hour was a 14-year-old girl. Nearly half the 47 wounded were teenagers on their way to school when the bus became an inferno of flying shrapnel, smoke and fire.
Survivors screamed "Mamma, Mamma" from the twisted wreckage of bus number 20, whose windows were shattered and interior ripped apart. Israeli parents in the Kiryat Menahem neighbourhood ran out of apartment buildings screaming, "Where are my kids? Where are my kids?"
A witness who was driving past the bus as it exploded said he saw "people draped out of the windows . . . one of them with their head to one side, not moving. Two or three children were screaming inside the bus, and then they climbed out of the window". The blast was so powerful it splattered human flesh and blood on a white wall some 30 metres away.
"Suddenly there was a huge explosion, something fell on my head and I fell to the floor," said one of the passengers, Mr Yitzhak Cohen. "Around me there were lots of bodies everywhere, some of them lying on top of the others. It was a mixture of people - people on their way to work, and a lot of high-school students."
Ms Tamar Ravivo said she had been sitting at the back of the bus with barely a glance at any of the other passengers. "I never believed that this would happen in my neighbourhood," she said. "So I wasn't looking and just read my book of Psalms. Suddenly there was such an explosion . . . and people flew in the air, on fire."
The bomber boarded the bus before detonating explosives strapped to his body shortly after 7 a.m., Israeli police said.
In the moments immediately after the explosion, rescue workers quickly covered a charred torso hanging out of the bus window. Many of the wounded were put into the cars of passers-by who took them to hospital rather than waiting for ambulances to arrive, witnesses said. "The explosion was so loud I thought the roof [of my house\] had come off," said Mr Ariel Gino, who lives near the attack site. "I rushed out and saw people lying on the street. Some were screaming, some were crying. There were about five or six people still in the bus. They weren't moving. Some on the street had blood on their faces, others had burns."
Police identified the bomber as a 23-year-old man from Bethlehem. - (Reuters)