The FTSE 100 index edged up on Tuesday, led by miners after metal prices rose overnight and oil bounced, but weighed by tobacco stocks.

BHP Billiton , Xstrata , Rio Tinto , Anglo American and Vedanta Resources were trading up about 2 percent. Metals futures traded in a narrow range on Tuesday morning.

British American Tobacco was among the main losers, down 0.7 percent, but Imperial Tobacco was steady as sentiment was hurt by a $200 billion (105 million pound) U.S. lawsuit filed by light cigarette smokers gained class action status on Monday. U.S. tobacco companies were down sharply overnight.

By 8:24 a.m., the FTSE was up 39.1 points, or 0.7 percent, at 5,837.4 points, buoyed by late Wall Street gains.

Oil held above $61 after rebounding from a six month low as speculators feared a deepening fall could prompt OPEC to rein in output. Royal Dutch Shell rose 0.7 percent after it said on Tuesday it had signed a deal with Turkey's Calik Energy and Italy's ENI on its possible participation in a key Turkish oil pipeline project. In Russia, a Kremlin source said Western governments have overreacted to Russian concerns about Shell's massive Sakhalin energy project because the legal basis for the development was not under question. BP rose 1.2 percent.

Among other standout gainers, Wolseley was up 1.7 percent after a share placing announced yesterday sent the building and plumbing supplier's shares down 6 percent.

PartyGaming rose 0.3 percent, unaffected by news that the chairman and director of online gambling company World Gaming have resigned, amid the continuing clampdown of the sector by authorities in the United States.

Among retailers, Morrison Supermarkets gained 1 percent after Lehman upped its recommendation to overweight from equal weight and raised its price target and Tesco was steady after Lehman reduced it to equal weight from overweight.

Elsewhere, Enterprise Inns slipped 1.2 percent after the pubs group said it expected year pren tax profit to meet expectations after its pubs had increased their average core profit by over 5 percent.

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