Police in Paris say a man has been killed after an exchange of gunfire outside a police station in the 18th arrondissement in Paris.
Advertisement
News of the attack came after President Francois Hollande addressed New Year’s greetings to France’s police.
“Always Charlie!” reads the Thursday front page of far-left French daily L’Humanité, as France marks the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Paris offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo that left 12 dead.
The French interior ministry said the man could be heard shouting “Allahu Akbar” before he was shot.
Minutes earlier, President Francois Hollande had praised police in a speech commemorating the January 2015 Paris killings.
Hollande said officers die in the line of duty “so that we can live free”.
France has been under a state of emergency since a series of attacks claimed by the Islamic State group killed 130 people in Paris on November 13th.
Writing on Twitter, Anna Poloyni, who lives close to the scene, said: “The police told neighbours to close their windows and said it was risky to stay on the balcony”.
The French Interior Ministry says investigators believe that no other people were involved in an attack at a police station in which the assailant was killed by police.
Numerous attackers in both January’s rampage and the massacre in November were known to French security services, having either traveled overseas to fight with extremists or been prevented from doing so.
A police bodyguard tasked with guarding the newspaper’s editor, Charb, was killed alongside him by brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi and in scenes caught on film the brothers shot dead another policeman, Ahmed Merabet, as he sprawled on the pavement near Charlie Hebdo’s offices.
The police official said police are viewing the incident as “more likely terrorism” than a standard criminal act.
Advertisement
The man shot dead on Thursday was not carrying identification papers, and has yet to be formally identified.
