Northern line commuters read their newspapers the morning after the latest attack on the capital. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA
Four apparently failed bombs, three at tube stations, one on a bus, again at the cardinal compass points of London. Anxious passengers evacuated, streets cordoned off, travel disrupted across the capital. Four men possibly on the run. One man - later released - arrested at gunpoint on live television just outside Downing Street. A city shaken to be reminded of events two weeks ago, when a similar pattern of bombs killed 56 people.
How on earth do you tell that story with a picture? The Sun decides that you can't, and splashes "4 SUICIDE BOMBERS ON LOOSE" starkly across its front page. The Telegraph and the Independent opt for a jumble of photographs like a pinboard in a student kitchen, which at least adequately conveys the sense of chaos, and the magnitude of the task now facing police. The montage shows weeping children, armed police with guns raised, emergency workers in gas masks, a suspect being searched, a young woman breathing into a paper bag to try to calm down, and police officers, police vehicles, police tape everywhere.
The Guardian takes a slightly more structured approach and quarters the picture area of its front page - one shot for each of the incidents - together presenting the broader story. In Warren Street, passengers weep with fear or relief after being evacuated. At Oval, frantic-looking police in bulletproof vests order people back behind a security cordon. In Shepherd's Bush, wary-looking Muslim women edge along the pavement behind another line of police tape. At Shoreditch, a No 26 bus stands eerily alone on a deserted street in the afternoon sunshine. There are no captions.
Further down the page, a series of three pullquotes - again chosen to tell as much possible of the story as simply as possible - are presented just as starkly, but oddly without attribution. "The intent must have been to kill. The intention was not fulfilled." (That was Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner.) "These things are done to scare people, to make them worried." (Tony Blair, urging people to return to normal yesterday afternoon.) "I saw a guy being chased. People were trying to drop him, to rugby tackle him." (Paul Martin, a bystander at Oval station, who saw a man being chased by other passengers after a small explosion on a train.)
Inside, the papers struggle to make sense of it all; were the attacks linked to July 7, and why did the bombs apparently fail? The Times presents three scenarios. "Version 1: Copy-cat Islamic radical group" without access to as much explosive as the July 7 bombers - intention to cause panic, not deaths. "Version 2: Same cell, but without the help of their bombmaker the devices failed to properly explode ... They chose a similar cross-shaped configuration of targets" as those of July 7. "Version 3: Supporters of the same al-Qaida-linked cell but not prepared to die." Gloomily, the paper says the message to Londoners and tourists is: "You are targets for a rolling siege." The Times, incidentally, has a close-up picture which it says is the Shoreditch bus bomb.
The Guardian says experts are puzzled as to whether the bombs were intended to cause greater harm. An army bomb disposal expert told the paper it was unlikely that all four bombs would fail in the same way; the implication being that the bombs were never intended to explode, merely to cause panic. On the other hand, explosives experts observe that triacetonetriperoxide, the explosive thought to have been used in both sets of attacks, degrades over time, and would lose two-thirds of its mass over two weeks, perhaps supporting the Times's "version number two".
Where to now? The Sun clearly believes the attacks were intended to kill, and concentrates on the manhunt, believing there are four men on the run. It cites eyewitness accounts of one man running away from the Shepherd's Bush scene "toward the Beeb HQ", one from the Oval scene after a scuffle with "tube heroes" who tried to detain him, and speaks of rumours that a man ran into University College Hospital "with wires protruding from a hole in his blue top" - the Mirror has a similar report of wires under the clothing in its Shepherd's Bush account.
Although it quotes the usual lines about carrying on as normal, the Independent reports that British Transport Police have been told to engage in more "intrusive policing" - stopping and searching suspicious passengers - and the paper's leader goes so far as to propose airport-style screening for bags on the underground.
Leader columns elsewhere are more stoical; the Times calls for vigilance, the Mirror for vigilance and bravery, the Sun for a stiffening of resolve and commitment to tracking down those responsible. The Telegraph speaks for most, however: "The unpleasant duty of Londoners now and in the months ahead is to go about their business as normal, and deny our enemies the satisfaction of seeing them quail."
A sad and subdued note is struck by the sketch writers, who seem to have started yesterday - parliament's last day before the summer holiday - in a mood of demob happiness. Ann Treneman in the Times gives a laudatory account of Tony Blair's statement urging everyone to get back to normal. Mr Blair said that "after the conference he would be holding meetings, which sounded very dull and was therefore exactly the right thing to be doing". Simon Hoggart in the Guardian attempts to keep his spirits up in an initially knockabout ramble around Westminster which can't fail to end on the news that London was under attack again. "It was a sad, almost elegiac end to a difficult session."
And to think that today was supposed to be the first day of the silly season.
- This post is an extract from the Wrap, Guardian Unlimited's email digest of the best of the day's papers. You can currently sign up for a free one-month trial
