An armed police officer patrols at Boulevard de Barbes, Jan.
7. Lionel
Bonaventure / AFP / Getty Images
Ministry
spokesperson Pierre-Henry Brandet said the man attempted to enter the reception
area of the police station in Goutte d’Or in the city’s 18th arrondissement
while shouting “Allahu akhbar” — “God is great” in Arabic — before being fired
at by officers.
The
French Ministry of Justice released a statement saying the man had a piece of
paper on him depicting the ISIS flag and “an unequivocal claim of
responsibility written in Arabic.”
Brandet
said the man may have been wearing an explosive vest. Bomb disposal officers
were on site. A short while later, the Paris prosecutor said in a statement
that the vest worn by the man was fake.
Images
of the man lying dead on the sidewalk circulated on Twitter, including one of
him being approached by a bomb disposal robot.
Anna Polonyi/AFP / Getty Images
After the shooting, police
cleared hundreds of people from the Goutte d’Or neighborhood, which is located
close to the Gare du Nord international train station, over fears more
potential assailants could be at large, AP reported.
The
police expanded their security cordon around an hour after the incident,
clearing hundreds of people from nearby streets and a local Metro station.
Shops in the area were also ordered to close.
The incident came as Paris marked the anniversary of the
terror attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, which took place one year ago today and ended with 12
people, including some of France’s leading satirists and cartoonists, being
killed.
In an address in Paris
commemorating the attack Thursday, French President François Hollande remarked
that “terrorism still weighs heavily on our country,” following further attacks
in Paris in November 2015 in which 130 people died.
Hollande
also promised 5,000 additional police and gendarmes by 2017, as well as 2,000
extra intelligence service jobs, calling it an “unprecedented” strengthening of
national security, the BBC reported.
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