Paris police shoot and wound man with knife at Montparnasse station

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PARIS (Reuters) -French police shot and wounded a knife-wielding man in Montparnasse train station in central Paris on Friday, the city prosecutor’s office said.

A police officer shot in the leg the 34-year-old man who then stabbed himself in the throat, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement, adding: “He was quickly taken care of by emergency services.”

A passer-by was hit in the foot by one of the shots fired by police, the prosecutor’s statement said.

The man had waved a knife at officers who were waiting for him at Montparnasse as part of an investigation of domestic violence carried out by police in a southern suburb of Paris.

He received an 18-months suspended sentence in September on account of several alleged domestic violence offences, the prosecutor’s office said.

A Reuters photographer who was at the station when the incident occurred said the incident had caused panic among commuters and weekend travellers, just a day after France marked the 10th anniversary of attacks by a jihadist group in Paris in which 130 people were killed.

“The memory of the attacks on November 13 (2015) is still there,” said one witness, Elvire Vaisse. “I thought to myself, ‘Here we go again.’ Suddenly I felt really stressed.”

(Reporting by Stephane Mahe, Alessandro Parodi and Inti Landauro; writing by Richard Lough; editing by Philippa Fletcher and Gareth Jones)