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Bomb explodes on Wall Street, one injured

NEW YORK: A bomb exploded in New York's financial district early on Friday, sending shattered glass onto Wall Street and disrupting the morning commute for scores of brokers and bankers.

Police said the explosion, which caused only one minor injury, occurred at about 4:40 a.m. EST (0940 GMT) in front of 75 Wall Street, a building owned by British banking group Barclays Plc.

"At 4:40 a.m. an explosive device detonated before 75 Wall Street," New York City Chief of Detectives William Allee.

"We've searched the area for other devices. We've used bomb sniffing dogs. We consider the area safe," Allee told reporters in a dawn press conference on the glass-strewn street.

Barclays said it has no operations in the building. Space is sublet to tenants that include financial firms Dresdner Kleinwort Benson and J.P. Morgan.

The explosion also damaged 95 Wall Street, which is across the street from the Barclays building. A passerby who suffered an ear injury from the blast was treated and released, police said.

Allee said New York City police as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation were investigating the blast and that no one had claimed responsibility yet for the explosion.

New York City Police Lieutenant Dennis Cirillo said police wanted to question a man who allegedly fled the scene after the blast. He was described as a light-skinned black male, weighing 200 to 225 pounds (90 to 102 kg), wearing a tan construction coat.

About 70 police and fire officials, including members of a bomb squad, converged on the scene. The streets in the area were cut off to traffic, causing a rush-hour nightmare for workers in the financial district.

Witnesses reported hearing a large explosion in the early hours of a foggy morning in New York.

"It was the biggest explosion I ever heard. It seemed like the building would have come down," said Dennis Theodore, a vice president with Worldco, a brokerage in a building next to 75 Wall Street.

Theodore, who called 911, said the building he was in shook from the force of the explosion, which occurred on the street in front of the buildings and not very far from the site of the 1993 World Trade Centre explosion, which killed six people and injured more than 1,000.

Officials at the scene were examining a device apparently involved in the explosion. One officer at the scene said they were looking at a box found by the buildings.

Separately, a building near the explosion was closed for a bomb scare, a policeman at the scene said. Police and bomb-sniffing dogs were inside the building.

The New York Stock Exchange, located a short distance away will open for business as usual this morning, a spokesman said. Hussein Malik, treasuries strategist at J.P. Morgan, said there was no disruption to its New York trading operation on Friday morning.-Reuters