My fiance and I are Malaysians living in London.

We were both on the tube yesterday morning and when the trains stopped running. We were told that the service has been suspended and my first thought was, 'We won the Olympic bid yesterday, so today, of course, the tube must stop working to the embarrassment of everyone!'

It was only when I got to work and after a combination of TV reports, web updates and communications from friends that the full picture slowly built up.

I still can't quite pinpoint the point in time when it dawned on me and my colleagues that it wasn't a power surge that caused the explosions. Perhaps it was when the reports about the bus explosion were confirmed.

It was surreal, everyone was incredibly calm and tried to get on with work. In fact, we were to have had a client entertainment event the same evening. The management started discussing about calling it off and phoning everyone who had confirmed their attendance. Once we were done with that, the management started thinking about how on earth to get the staff home.

Throughout, people interspersed their work with taking calls from loved ones and friends and from time to time, surfing the Web for the latest updates. Eventually, some trains began operating again and my fiance and I managed to squeeze ourselves into one and get off at a station for a short walk home. Otherwise, it would have been, perhaps, a three-hour trek to cover the 5-6 miles home. Many on the streets with us yesterday would have done that and more.

I recount yesterday not because it is some self-therapy session. Nor is it to demonstrate any callousness on our part. If there had been something that any of us could do to help the emergency services, we would have done so.

Rather, I recount the day because we understand that your aim is to strike fear and to disrupt and eradicate our freedom and liberties. Well, no matter how many you kill or maim, I am afraid you are not going to succeed. I am, in all probability, actually wasting my time.

I don't think you have either the emotional quotient or the mental capacity to understand this. If you had, you would realise that Madrid was a failure, just like Sept 11. Yes, the death toll and the emotional pain these incidents cause are great.

But we, the citizens of this world, the peace-loving people of every creed, colour, faith, age and background do not buy your morally and ideological bankrupt notion of courage. You are cowards.

That's why you dare not show your face. That's why you target innocent people whose names are John, Jane, Antonio, Yithzak, Wong, Kim, Thabo, Mohammed, Kumar etc. You know that were you to attempt to reason and rationalise your so-called struggle, you would show the complete lack of intelligence, logic, persuasiveness or righteousness on your part.

Therefore, you are only prepared to communicate through the language of fear. Just like the school playground bully.

Well, we understand fear. We fear living in a society where there are no freedoms or liberties. We fear hate. We fear irrationality. We fear that in physically protecting ourselves, we ourselves will strangle our souls.

For all of these reasons, we do not fear you because while you can take lives, you cannot take away the basis of our civilisation. That of freedom of religion, belief, expression, of liberty, of democracy and of the desire to better and improve ourselves through work, charity, and our personal faith.

If you were courageous, you would be building schools, hospitals, homes, roads, water pipes, power stations, mosques, churches, temples, synagogues and doing unto your neighbour as you would wish they do unto you. Because you cannot, or will not, you show your lack of comprehension of what is the true nature of diligence, sacrifice, righteousness and courage.

The citizens of London (and we come from every part of the world and are believers of every faith under the sun) today and in the days to come will mourn our loss. We will grief for a season. But even during this season, we will continue to live our lives as we did before.

And many others will continue to migrate to this city to better their lives, to fulfil their dreams, and to achieve their ambitions. But as for you, you can continue to run from safe house to safe house, from foxhole to foxhole, cave to cave, country to country.

You can continue to plot to maim and kill and at the same time demean your own human nature and destroy your soul. We pity you. We pray for God to have mercy on you and be gracious to you. And we forgive you because we do not want to be consumed by hate like you.

And on the day of reckoning, we do not want the account of our lives to be measured by the amount of hate we have for God's creations and the number of eyes blinded, ears deafened, arms and legs maimed and amputated, and lives murdered.