(AFP) updated version

Thousands of people were evacuated today from the world's tallest office buildings in Kuala Lumpur after a bomb scare.

Police searched the 88-storey Petronas Twin Towers for two hours after receiving a telephone call saying a bomb had been planted in one of the buildings.

Dang Wangi district police chief Mohd Bakri Mohd Zimin, told AFP that workers and shoppers were allowed to re-enter the buildings after they had been declared safe around midday.

Earlier, deputy city police chief Dell Akhbar Khan told AFP an anonymous telephone caller had warned the management at the complex, which includes a vast shopping mall, that a bomb had been planted in one of the buildings.

It was not immediately clear whether there was a link to the terrorist attacks in the United States, in which hijacked airliners were crashed into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center yesterday.

Some US officials have suggested that Muslim extremists could be responsible for the attacks.

A second bomb threat hard on the heels of the first forced the evacuation of the 23-storey IBM office building on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. After a three-hour search, police declared the building safe.

The twin towers are adjacent to the Mandarin Hotel, where army chiefs from the United States and Pacific countries have been meeting this week.

Back home

US Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, cut short his attendance at the meeting and flew home today in the wake of the attacks, which also targeted the US military headquarters at the Pentagon.

"The US army chief is flying home. There is a crisis and he is going back," an army official said.

The officers received the news of the attacks while they were attending a reception hosted by the defence ministry on yesterday evening.

The official said the officers, who had been meeting here since Monday to map out strategies for facing future challenges together, were shocked by the scale of the disaster.

Other army chiefs attending the conference are from Australia, Bangladesh, Brunei, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Tonga and Thailand.

They were aware of the evacuation of the twin towers near the conference centre but were continuing their meeting, the official said.

A separate meeting of senior officers from 33 countries in the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions, which was being held at the same time as the army chiefs' conference, would also go ahead, he said.

Security around the conference centre has been beefed up.