New York exchanges to reopen

NEW YORK'S five commodity futures exchanges were last night planning to reopen this morning after the bomb blast at the World Trade Centre complex forced them to evacuate on Friday.

'We will definitely be 100 per cent open on Monday,' Donna Redel, the Comex chairman, said, adding that officials of the five exchanges - Comex, the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange, the New York Futures Exchange, the New York Cotton Exchange and the New York Mercantile Exchange - met the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, operator of the complex, on Saturday night.

Financial firms with offices or headquarters in the World Trade Centre include Dean Witter Reynolds, Kemper Securities Group, Keefe Bruyette & Woods and Cantor Fitzgerald.

There are expected to be large insurance claims for loss of business, but experts said it was too early to say which insurers would be affected.

The authorities said they would work with tenants this week to allow them to enter their offices to remove important business information.