Police have raised the confirmed toll in attacks in London last week to 52 as jittery commuters returned to work on the transport network targeted by bombers.

The authorities said retrieving the bodies of victims killed in Thursday's morning rush-hour attacks continued to be a laborious process, with workers on Monday still pulling corpses from a mangled underground train deep beneath the streets of the capital.

About 700 people were injured in the Thursday attacks, 60 of whom remain in hospitals.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, addressing parliamentarians for the first time since the attacks, denounced what he called a "murderous carnage of the innocent" and said the evidence pointed to "Islamic extremists".

Blair said no specific intelligence was available that might have helped the authorities thwart the bombings, answering critics who have questioned the government's vigilance and readiness.

"Our country will not be defeated by such terror," he told the House of Commons. "We will pursue those responsible wherever they are and will not rest until they are identified and ... brought to justice."

Commuters returned to work in London on Monday at the start of the first full week since bombs struck a double-decker bus and three underground trains.

Return to work

Many travellers said they would defy the attackers by using public transport as normal, but some were too afraid and took taxis instead.

"I ... will not let the attacks put me off," computer consultant Paul Williams, 42, said as he prepared to board an underground train in central London. "As far as I am concerned, it is just a normal day at work."

But Ted Wright, chairman of the British Poultry Council, said he was taking a taxi to avoid the London Underground railway system, commonly known as the Tube.

"In light of what has happened, I have decided to take a taxi. It will probably cost an extra six pounds ($10.70), but should hopefully put my wife's mind at rest."

The British Transport Police urged Londoners to return to work and reopen their businesses in defiance of the bombers.

Underscoring how London remained tense in the attacks' aftermath, police on Monday briefly closed several streets where most government offices are located - including parliament, the Foreign Office, and Blair's 10 Downing Street office - after a suspicious package was found.

Search for bodies

Mayor Ken Livingstone took the Tube to work on Monday to send out the message that Londoners should "carry on".

"We are going to work. We carry on our lives," he said. "We don't let a small group of terrorists change the way we live."

Police said they identified the first of the victims - Susan Levy, 53, of Hertfordshire, outside London. Forensics experts have warned it could take days or weeks to put names to the bodies, many of which were mangled in the blasts.

Transit officials said the number of passengers using the system on Monday morning was back to normal.

However, a few sections of the underground railway system affected by the attacks remained closed on Monday, and the number of shoppers in central London has fallen by about 25% since the attacks, British media reported.

For investigators, Monday was another pressure-packed day of sifting through subterranean debris, checking tips from the public and identifying the dead and missing.

Police said they were still working to recover the remaining bodies from one of the trains damaged in Thursday's blasts.

More than 20 metres below the surface, teams of workers - clad in white suits and wearing face masks to protect them from the dust - dealt with sweltering heat and rats as they removed some of the bodies from the train wreckage in the tunnel between Russell Square and King's Cross.

It is unknown how many more bodies remain below, but searchers said conditions are unlike any they had encountered before.

Poland arrest

British intelligence officials over the weekend met their counterparts from about two dozen countries to brief them on the attacks and the investigation, police said.

Security officials in Poland said they searched the home of a British citizen of Pakistani origin in the eastern Polish city of Lublin in connection with the bombings. Poland's Internal Security Agency did not release the man's name.

A man with British and Moroccan nationality mentioned as a possible suspect told The Guardian newspaper in an interview published on Monday that he had nothing to do with the blasts.

"Over 30 years I have lived in Britain, I have never been involved in violence or crime," said Mohamed Guerbouzi, who was convicted in absentia in Morocco in 2003 and sentenced to 20 years in prison in connection with bombings in Casablanca. "I'm scared for my safety," Guerbouzi said.

London tourists

Despite the ferocity of the attacks, scores of tourists wandered around London.

Sally Mathiesen, a professor from San Diego State University in California travelling with her students, said they had no plans to return home.

"We heard the explosion, and our students said 'it sounds like a bomb', and we said 'nah'," she said of the blast that tore apart a bus at Tavistock Square. "Since then, all of the students have gotten back on mass transport."

As people mourned the missing and the dead, the leaders of Britain's Christians, Muslims and Jews urged conciliation, not revenge.

They met "to proclaim our wish to resist any form of violence and to work for reconciliation and peace", Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor said.

Anti-Muslim violence

Yet there were some reports of violence towards mosques around Britain, including arson attacks on mosques in east London, Leeds, Telford and Birkenhead which resulted in minor damage. There were also reports of damage at two mosques in Bristol.

Chris Fox, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said it was likely that there were other incidents that had not been reported.

"We encourage everyone to report this type of obnoxious and dangerous behavior, from whatever quarter, for full police investigation as we are determined that there will be a very robust enforcement response to it," he said.

Investigators remained silent on suspects in the bombings, but reports in London newspapers identified a possible suspect as Mustafa Setmarian Nasar - a Syrian believed to be al-Qaida's operations chief in Europe and the alleged mastermind of last year's Madrid railway bombings.

London police refused to comment, but a US official said both nations were trying to locate Nasar.

"He has been a longtime and well-known bad guy terrorist, and involved in terrorist circles," Fran Townsend, US President George Bush's homeland security adviser, said on the Fox television network.

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