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Citibank target of Tokyo bomb threats

Bomb threats against Citibank offices forced the evacuation of several high-rise buildings in and near Tokyo, but employees returned to work after police determined the buildings were safe, police and witnesses said.

Concern about attacks on US corporations abroad have risen sharply following last week's devastating attacks by suicide pilots on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

People inside the 30-floor Akasaka Park Building and well as the Tokyo Bankers' Association Building, in separate financial districts in the nation's capital, were told to leave their buildings after phone calls saying that a bomb planted at an unspecified Citibank office in the Tokyo area would go off.

Another Citibank retail office in the Otemachi financial district was also briefly evacuated, a security guard at the building said.

Police in the city of Kawasaki, just south of Tokyo, said a call placed at 0519 GMT to Citibank threatened that a bomb would go off in the 24-storey building housing the bank within 20 minutes, police said. No bomb went off, they added.

Citibank officials could not be reached for comment.

A police spokesman, meanwhile, was reluctant to write off the phone calls as pranks.

"Although there have been no reports of bomb explosions, we are not able to state clearly that they were pranks," he said.

Kyodo news agency said a Citibank branch in Osaka, western Japan, was also evacuated.

The bomb scare forced Chase Manhattan Bank's Tokyo branch to suspend its foreign exchange and other trading operations, a spokeswoman told Reuters.

All operations by US brokerage J P Morgan Securities Asia PTE Limited Tokyo Branch were also suspended, she said.

"We had a bomb scare around 2:30 p.m. (in Tokyo) and all people in the building had to evacuate. Therefore we had to suspend foreign exchange and other trading operations," said Atsuko Yoshitsugu, spokeswoman for Chase.

CALM, CONCERN

People at the Akasaka Park building and Tokyo Bankers' Association sites milled about calmly for about two hours and some roads were blocked off before police confirmed that no bombs had been planted and told them they could return to work.

"I think in light of what happened last week, you can't not take this seriously. It makes you cautious," said Michael McCorkle, who works for an independent US firm in the Tokyo Bankers' Association Building, where Citibank occupies five floors.

Others said they were less worried.

"I'm assuming it was a hoax," said Fumihiro Hozumi, who works for the Tokyo International Financial Futures Exchange which is housed in the same building.

Some of the financial firms told their employees to go home for the day, one company source said.

Separately, a police spokesman said an unidentified person had called two of Tokyo's top hotels, the Hotel Okura and Hotel New Otani, and told them bombs had been planted in the hotels.

But a Hotel New Otani spokesman said police had ended their investigation after confirming there was no bomb.

A spokeswoman for the Hotel Okura said no bomb threat had been received and the hotel was taking no special measures.

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