Last updated at 11:14 07 July 2007

Advertising executive Rachel North, who had survived a horrific rape, was a commuter at King's Cross when a suicide bomber stepped onto her train and killed 26 people. Rachel, 36, survived, but came under attack yet again - this time by a cyberstalker who terrorised her for over a year.

Now, a week after her stalker was jailed, Rachel, who lives in North London, tells her story of survival, recovery and hope.

Thursday, July 7, 2005, began with me waking, curled into my boyfriend's back. I showered, dressed, we kissed and he wished me good luck. I didn't know then how much luck I would need that day. I headed out to the kiosk at Finsbury Park station to buy Marie Claire magazine before boarding the train to work.

The magazine, published that day, contained a story about me, and I was nervous and excited to read it.

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I hurried on to the Piccadilly line platform, and the crush of people and noise of the train faded away as I started to read the story of the rape ordeal that nearly cost me my life.

As I read it, I relived it all again. My heart beat faster and my breathing was shallow.

The next Tube arrived and I decided to board at the front of the train, where I might have a little more space to read that article again. I got onto the train and stood by the yellow pole in the centre of the standing area.

At King's Cross, the doors slid open, and I was pushed towards the centre of the carriage. Though I didn't know it at the time, somewhere behind me, boarding through the middle set of doors was a young Jamaicanborn British man with a rucksack. It contained 10lb of explosives.

Germaine Lindsay, 19 years old, had chosen this rush-hour morning at King's Cross station, and this carriage in which to die.

The train started to move. I took a deep breath and unclenched my fists. It was impossible to read any more, so I read the adverts on the train walls.

Suddenly, I felt rather than heard an explosion; it was as if I had been punched violently in both ears. The world went black, and it felt like I had been plunged underwater.

Everything had changed in a heartbeat. And the thought flashed through me. 'Not again. Not bloody again.'

It was almost exactly three years since the early hours of Friday July 17, 2002, when I had forced my way out of my North London flat, naked and covered in blood, with my hands bound behind my back and a wire noose around my neck, screaming as I threw my body across the bonnet of a police car.

I had arrived home earlier that night to our empty ground-floor flat - my boyfriend (whom I prefer to keep anonymous, but known as Jay) was working late.

I went straight to sleep but was woken by the doorbell. I pulled a dressing gown around me and got out of bed, thinking Jay must have forgotten his key.

As I stepped into the communal hall, I could see a figure through the fluted glass of the front door. A voice said: "It's your neighbour - there's been an accident."

I opened the door cautiously. But it was wrenched from my hands and a stranger pushed me back through the door of my flat.

He punched me in the face as hard as he could, my nose poured blood, and the world whirled.

I was on the floor, and he kicked me in the chest. Then in the ribs, then he aimed at my face, and I curled into a ball, trying to protect myself. I could only whimper "please don't, please don't".

He grabbed a fistful of my hair, and I could see he was tearing off his T-shirt. He forced it over my head as a hood and the beating began again.

My top lip burst like a ripe tomato. The punch on the nose made me want to vomit. I felt my dressing gown being torn off me and I realised he was raping me, muttering: "Bitch. Whore."

I kept very still. I felt him yanking my arms behind my back and tying my wrists. He went into the bathroom and tied something round my neck. I could feel myself losing hope that I would survive.

The blows were coming harder and angrier. Then it occurred to me to play dead. I waited for a blow to the head, collapsed, gurgled and held my breath.

There was a hiss. He stubbed his cigarette out on my face. The wetness of my blood extinguished it at once. I continued to pretend to be dead, hardly breathing. But I was losing consciousness.

Perhaps two hours later I started to come round, lying on the floor with my arms tied behind me. I was naked with something hanging around my neck.

The front door of the flat was open into the communal hall. I stumbled down the outside steps as a police car screeched to a halt. I didn't know it but my neighbours had heard me try to get out of my flat and dialled 999.

I threw myself across the bonnet. The two officers stared at me in shock. I screamed at them to cut the noose off my neck. It was the lead from my electric toothbrush charger.

An ambulance took me to hospital. The police doctor noted 40 injuries and took swabs. My head was stitched and at last Jay was brought in, and the first words he said were: "Oh, honey."

He wanted to take my hand, but they made him put on rubber gloves first. That was when I cried, because he was the first one to treat me like a person that night - not as a crime scene or prey - and they wouldn't let him touch me.

It was five months before police arrested an itinerant mugger who had come over illegally from Jamaica in May 2002. He had beaten and robbed many other women. He was 17. I had been 31 at the time of the attack.

The love of Jay and my family and friends helped me slowly recover from the ordeal, something which was part of a savage world which had no relation to the one I had been brought in.

I had grown up in a Norfolk vicarage with my brother and sister. I studied English and Theology at university and settled into a career in advertising in London. Before the rape, my life was ordinary, sometimes stressful, generally good. But my anger afterwards helped me from sinking into total despair.

In January 2004, I faced my attacker in a courtroom and saw him sentenced to 15 years. A year later, I talked to Marie Claire about my story, because I wanted to do something to help other rape victims.

This was the story I was reading and reliving on the Piccadilly line three years later in the minutes before I was blown up.

The bomb was detonated seven to ten feet away from me. I was once more on the floor, in darkness, struggling under a heavy, gasping body.

Once more the overwhelming blow to the head, the utter darkness, the blindness, the struggling for breath.

In a flash, I was transported back to the horror of the rape. But this time I was prepared.

Because I had just read my own near-death story, I was full of adrenaline. And this time I was not alone.

There was choking, lung-filling dust. I breathed tiny shards of glass and thick, heavy smoke. It made my tongue swell and crack like leather.

There was a metallic wet taste in my mouth - blood. My lips were wet with it. The walls dripped with it.

There was an acrid smell of chemicals and burning rubber and burning hair. Then I heard the screams.

They did not sound human. I realised that I was on the floor and there were squirming bodies lying on top of me. Other people's bodies had protected me from the worst of the blast. I hissed air out, patted my legs, arms - they were still here.

I heard a voice, far away, say: "Are you all right? Stay calm." It was my own voice.

I saw the shapes of bodies moving in the darkness. Some more passengers were standing up now and appealing for calm, listening for the injured. Some of us used our mobile phone LED screens for light.

Something bad beyond words had happened behind us - but we could not see it, only hear it.

I looked back into what remained of my carriage and caught a glimpse of bodies on the floor, and of something else so horrific I couldn't bear to see it. It was hard to hear the injured people's fainter cries, because of the terrified screaming.

As the temperature rose, it became extremely hard not to panic. It seemed likely that we would die trapped underground.

It took everything I had not to join in the screams. Only the thought that I refused to die screaming and clawing like a trapped animal held me back.

The driver was telling us we must leave the train. Hands helped me down the ladder of the driver's cab. The screams were fading as we walked down the narrow tracks.

There were groans of a seriously injured man being carried behind me. The women walking near me listened, talked and we tried to make jokes.

It took 15 minutes to walk down the tunnel to Russell Square and I saw something shiny poking out of my wrist, jammed into the bone.

It was bleeding everywhere and I staggered, but a woman caught me. Hands were lifting me off the tracks and onto the platform. They pulled my split wrist and I screamed. A small piece of metal was jerked out of the bone and it fell onto the tracks.

In the lift, people were falling sideways, eyes staring with shock. Some were covered in blood. All of them were filthy, with black faces like chimney sweeps.

I staggered onto the pavement outside and rang Jay, leaving a message. I was terrified that he was travelling on the train behind me and that he was dead.

I realised I was covered in a sticky black film of chemicals and blood. Not all of the blood was mine.

I was in deep shock. I rang a colleague, Jenna, who arrived in a taxi and bandaged my wrist as we headed for hospital. It was nearly 9.45am.

As we drove past Tavistock Square there was a dull 'crump' that made the taxi windows rattle. Later, I found out that it was the bus, targeted by another of the bombers, exploding on the other side of the trees.

We arrived at University College Hospital and they picked glass out of my arm. Every time I moved, small pieces of glass fell off me.

I started to get angry with myself because I thought I had somehow failed the passengers and done the wrong thing in leaving the train.

The phone beeped with a message from Jay. He was in his office at the law firm he works for, and he was alive.

Finally, I was allowed to leave hospital and I saw Jay loping calmly across the road, smiling at me. I threw myself into his arms.

"I can always trust you to end up in trouble," he told me, squeezing my hand.

I couldn't stop smiling; I was starting to feel invincible.

When we got home, I had a shower and the water ran black for five minutes. We went to bed but I couldn't sleep - there was still the smell of smoke and blood in my nose and throat.

I got up, turned on my computer and slivers of glass still stuck in my hair fell onto the keyboard. I started writing, posting my story and my thoughts on an internet bulletin board for thousands of Londoners giving their accounts of what happened that day.

As I wrote, I realised my face was wet with tears and sweat.

Other people started messaging back immediately, give their support. Finally, I fell asleep in the early hours. When I opened my eyes on July 8, there was a sickly fire taste in my mouth. My ears were still ringing, and they ached.

I wondered how many more people were waking up and wondering what had happened to them yesterday.

I went to the study and switched on the computer, logging onto the message board where I had posted my story the night before. There were now dozens of messages posted in response to my account.

I started to cry with gratitude that all these people were thinking of me.

Over the next few weeks, I had trouble sleeping and threw myself into work as adrenaline kept me going. I organised a gathering with other survivors, and we decided to call ourselves King's Cross United.

I had counselling, but the flashbacks continued. Sitting in a hairdresser's, I suddenly caught a whiff of scorched hair and a smell of chemicals, and had to rush outside. I knew it was a posttraumatic shock reaction.

I wanted to be the confident, cheerful woman I had been before, but I had changed in those months. I did not feel lucky: I felt cursed.

Six months to day after the bomb had exploded, King's Cross United gathered at King's Cross station, about 30 of us including the driver of the train, for our own private service. Then we walked to St Pancras church, where I laid 26 white roses, one for each person who had died.

Walking away, I felt the release of emotion as I linked arms with the others. We went to the pub, and I looked at the smiling faces of the men and women around me and we raised a toast.

"Take that, terrorists." Cheers.

But my story wasn't over. While I was writing up these memories, feeling happy about my new life and impending wedding - Jay asked me to marry him seven months after the blast - a third stranger attacked me.

This time, there was no physical violence. Instead, a woman whom I had never met began to write to and about me on an almost daily basis, making the most hurtful allegations.

Felicity Lowde accused me - through postings on internet message boards - of lying about the rape and not being a real bomb victim.

She claimed my efforts to help myself and other victims by campaigning for an inquiry, setting up support groups and raising awareness of post-traumatic stress, were "making a living on the backs of the dead".

After I posted online blogs telling of nights where I would wake crying from nightmares about the screams on the train, and my continuing 'survivor guilt', she cruelly asked me: "Why did you not stay and help the dying?"

It was psychological war, and in some ways it was worse than the rape and the bomb, because the rapist and bomber were strangers who unleashed brutal violence knowing nothing about me, even my name.

This woman used psychological violence to try to destroy everything I had re-built after the rape and bombing: my new work as a writercampaigner, and my happiness as a bride-to-be. It was devastating.

I was terrified, because having been the victim of stranger hatred twice already, I found that my symptoms of nightmares, exhaustion, depression, guilt and despair, already triggered by writing the book, were becoming almost unbearable.

I stopped working at home and moved into an office in order to finish the book I was writing about my experiences, because I felt she was attacking me in my home, my safe place.

I work online, and I get many anonymous e-mails from trauma victims asking for my help. So I couldn't switch my computer, and her, off.

Last month, she was sentenced in court after having been found guilty of harassment. She had gone on the run for two months while continuing to escalate her hate campaign.

The district judge gave her the maximum sentence, but my tormentor has already announced she intends to appeal and put me through giving evidence all over again.

So lightning has struck me three times. Three strangers have sought to destroy me using weapons of malice.

Do I feel cursed? No, I feel lucky. Lucky to have such support, from Jay, who is now my husband, family, friends and from hundreds of strangers - readers of my web diary and fellow passengers whom I have met since 7/7 and are now my friends.

I've learned how strong and kind most people are, and I feel blessed that I'm still here, still living, still learning, feeling proud and privileged to share my story. I hope that telling it helps other people.

I am out of the tunnel now, and I raise a glass to the light that I have seen in other people, that has kept me going through the darkest of days.

• Adapted by Amanda Cable from Out Of The Tunnel by Rachel North, published by The Friday Project at £6.99. ° Rachel North 2007. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870. www.rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com