Paris attack: knife-wielding man shot dead by police

Paris attack: knife-wielding man shot dead by police

A man carrying a knife has been shot dead by officers in Paris after trying to get into a police station on the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

“On Thursday morning, a man attempted to attack a policeman at the reception of the police station before being hit by shots from the police,” interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said.

A police bomb squad were deployed to the scene in Goutte d’Or district of northern Paris, close to the Gare du Nord international station.

The man reportedly shouted Allahu Akbar – “God is greatest” in Arabic – and was wearing what appeared to be a suicide vest with wires hanging from it.

But police and government sources later said the vest was a fake.

Pictures posted on Twitter showed a robot inspecting the dead body as it lay on the pavement outside the 18th district police station, with a what appeared to be a large knife lying nearby.

Anna Polonyi, an editor at International New York Times, tweeted: “My sister saw this man running towards the station before being shot down. Bomb team has been called in.”

She said police had told residents to close their windows and balconies, telling them: “It’s dangerous.”

#Barbes A man was just shot in front of the police station. My sister witnessed it from our balcony window.

— Anna Polonyi (@akilincs) January 7, 2016

The shooting took place exactly a year after Islamist militants attacked the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris.

Moments earlier, President Francois Hollande had given a speech to security forces to mark the anniversary.

Hollande called for greater co-operation between the security services in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the massacre that claimed 130 lives in Paris in September.

He said: “Faced with these adversaries, it is essential that every service – police, gendarmerie, intelligence, military – work in perfect harmony, with the greatest transparency, and that they share all the information at their disposal.”

Many of the jihadists in both January’s rampage and the attacks in November were known to French security services.

The president said that since the attack on Charlie Hebdo, nearly 200 people in France had been placed under travel restrictions to prevent them joining jihadi groups in Syria or Iraq.

The newspaper had been a potential target for extremists since it first published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006.

On Wednesday the Vatican complained after Charlie Hebdo published a special anniversary edition featuring a bloodstained, bearded God figure wearing sandals and carrying a Kalashnikov rifle, accompanied by the headline: “One year on: the killer is still at large.”