Man shot dead as he runs towards Paris police station shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ on anniversary of Charlie Hebdo shootings

An armed man ‘wearing a suicide belt’ has been shot dead outside a police station in Paris on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The man had been trying to enter the police station in Barbes, northern Paris, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and threatening officers with a knife.
French officials say the man was wearing a belt made out to look like a suicide vest, but a bomb-disposal unit has since confirmed that it was a fake.

A Paris police source confirmed that they are investigating the attack as potential terrorism.

Police have cleared hundreds of people from the neighborhood, an area where a significant percentage of residents have multi-ethnic or immigrant background, amid fears that other assailants could be at large.

‘The man did have a belt, but it was a fake. The bomb-disposal unit confirmed it was a fake,’ the police union source said.

A Paris police official said police are viewing the incident as ‘more likely terrorism’ than a standard criminal act.

Luc Poignant, a police union official, said the man may have been wearing an explosives vest, and cried out ‘Allahu Akbar’ or ‘God is great’ in Arabic.

A witness said he had heard ‘two or three shots’ shortly before 11am GMT, before the man was on the ground.

Photographs shared on social media shows the man’s body being inspected by a robot and French police said the neighbourhood in northern Paris has been locked down after the shooting.

At least a dozen riot police vans are blocking off the area in the Goutte d’Or district, just north of Gare du Nord.

Minutes before the shooting, French President Francois Hollande had paid homage to police officers killed in the line of duty, including three police shot to death during the January 7-9 attacks.

In a speech to police forces charged with protecting the country against new attacks, Hollande said the government was passing new laws and ramping up security, but the threat remained high.

Hollande especially called for better surveillance of ‘radicalized’ citizens who have joined Islamic State or other militant groups in Syria and Iraq when they return to France.

‘We must be able to force these people —and only these people— to fulfill certain obligations and if necessary to put them under house arrest … because they are dangerous,’ he said.

Three police officers were among the 17 dead in the attacks last January, which ended after two days of bloodshed in the Paris region.

Hollande said officers die in the line of duty ‘so that we can live free.’

Yvan Assioma, of the police union Alliance, said tension was high on the anniversary of the attacks against the Charlie Hebdo newspaper, which left two police officers dead a year ago Thursday.

‘The alert is constant,’ he told the broadcast network iTele. The Paris prosecutor’s office said it was investigating.

The incident outside the police station in Barbes came exactly one year after the terrorist attack on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Islamist militant brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi entered Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices and killed 11 people.

Two days later, Amedy Coulibaly, a friend of the Kouachi brothers, killed four and held more than a dozen people hostage at a kosher supermarket in Paris.

This week sees a number of memorial ceremonies held across Paris and France to honor the total of 17 victims who were killed in the attacks last January.