French officials: man with knife shot dead at police station

Police fatally shot a knife-wielding man attempting to enter a Paris police station on Thursday, according to local media.

It is understood that a bomb disposal team has been called to police station in northern Paris.

“You need to shake up people’s ideas or they stay stuck in their positions”, said cartoonist Riss, who lost the use of his right arm in the attack, in an interview with AFP.

In what has been a bloody year for France, the January 7 attacks at the Charlie Hebdo offices left 12 dead.

The man was also heard to shout “Allahu Akbar” as he approached the police station in the multi-ethnic neighborhood in the north of the capital, the interior ministry said.

Two officials say the man had wires extending from his clothing, and an explosives squad is on site.

French President Francois Hollande will address a gathering of anti-terror security forces at Paris’s police headquarters. Over the next two days, an accomplice shot a policewoman to death and then stormed a kosher supermarket, killing four hostages.

On January 10, another ceremony will take place on the Place de la Republique, the square in eastern Paris which attracted mass rallies in favour of free speech and democratic values after the attacks. France this week commemorates the victims of last year’s Islamic extremist attacks on satirical weekly Charlie H…

Following the January attacks, the government announced it planned to give police better equipment and to hire more intelligence agents.

The bloodshed stunned a nation that has become a target for jihadists and was again plunged into shock in November when 130 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded in coordinated attacks around Paris.

And Charlie has continued to raise ire, refusing self-censorship in the wake of the attacks, working from ultra-secure offices in a top-secret location.

Charlie Hebdo’s editor spoke about how the paper has dealt with the past year, “we’ve had to rebuild the newspaper, we’ve had to rebuild ourselves, confront our pains”.

Charlie Hebdo, known for its satirical covers lampooning political and religious leaders, lost many of its top editorial staff when Islamist militants broke into an editorial meeting on January 7, 2015, and opened fire. “And now I don’t really know what it means”.