French railway police on Monday, February 3, shot and wounded two people, including a man wielding a fake gun who was spray-painting a swastika at a busy Paris station, a police source and the prosecutor's office said.
When the man who was spray-painting a swastika appeared to draw a weapon at the Gare d'Austerlitz in southeastern Paris, railway police shot him and another person "several times," a police source told Agence France-Presse (AFP). Both were injured. The Paris prosecutor's office said the gun then turned out to be a dummy.
The person who had been carrying out the graffiti was gravely wounded, while a traveler was also injured by a ricochet, it said. The incident disrupted traffic, with some trains running late.
"I was sitting outside the train station, just in front of the entrance. I heard shooting and people screaming," a woman, who witnessed the scene and did not want to give her name, told AFP. She said that the police arrived "immediately."
The woman said she thought it was an argument between two taxi drivers, "but people were quite scared, some were running," she added.
The courtyard of the train station was closed to the public Monday afternoon, an AFP journalist said. Police officers and soldiers were deployed to the scene, with a security perimeter set up at the station.