A 59-year-old British national, Mary Jean Gardner, was the woman killed in Wedsnesday’s bomb explosion in the center of Jerusalem which also left dozens wounded near the central bus station.
The blast shattered the windows of two buses and shook ­buildings hundreds of metres away.
Israel’s Minister of Public Security, Yitzhak ­Aharonovich, said the 2kg device was in a bag on the pavement.
"We believe the terrorist attack was carried out by Palestinians with the intent to kill as many Israelis as was possible near the central bus station in Jerusalem," said Mickey Rosenfeld,Israel's police spokesperson.
Mary Jean Gardner, an evangelic Christian and bible translator, was studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem where she enrolled in a six-month program that the University's Rothberg International School runs together with the Home for Bible Translators and Scholars in Jerusalem.
She arrived in Israel in January after having spent 10 years in Togo, West Africa.
A passionate about languages, her latest project was to help translate the Holy Scriptures into the Ife tribal language, which is spoken in Benin and Togo.
She was born in Orkney, a small town in Scotland.
"She was a quiet, sensitive and introverted person, highly motivated. She had a seriousness and commitment that is to be admired, being over 50 and coming to study Hebrew, archaeology, the land of the bible and the history of the land. You need a commitment for that, and you saw that language was really her life," said Miriam Ronning, a Bible translator from Finland who co-founded the University’s center.
British Foreign Minister William Hague called the bomb attack, the first in Jerusalem since 2004, a "callous and disgusting act of terrorism."
Britain's ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould laid a wreath on Thursday afternoon at the scene of the attack.