One policeman was killed and another later died of his wounds in a shooting incident in central Paris on Thursday night, a police source said.
Shots have since been fired in a new location near the Champs-Elysees. According to Reuters, the gunman who was killed in the shooting was known to security services.
A person who fired on police on the Champs-Elysees shopping boulevard just days ahead of France’s presidential election has been killed, the source said. A police source also said there had been two assailants, and a witness told Reuters that one man got out of a car at the scene and began shooting with a machine gun.
An anti-terrorist from the Paris prosecutor’s office has taken over the investigation into the incident.
President Donald Trump commented on the incident, calling it a “terrible thing,” and sent his condolences.
“What can you say? It just never ends,” Trump added.
Police authorities called on the public to avoid the area.
A Reuters reporter saw a helicopter flying low over central Paris, apparently part of a follow-up police operation.
Police officers were deliberately targeted in the Paris Champs-Elysees avenue shooting, but it is too early to say what the motive was, French Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said on Thursday.
Police sources had said earlier that the shooting could have been an attempt at an armed robbery.
French TV channel BFM broadcast footage of the Arc de Triomphe monument and top half of the Champs Elysees packed with police vans, lights flashing and heavily armed police shutting the area down after what was described by one journalist as a major exchange of fire nears a Marks and Spencers store.
The incident came as French voters prepared to go to the polls on Sunday in the most tightly-contested presidential election in living memory.
France has lived under a state of emergency since 2015 and has suffered a spate of Islamist militant attacks that have killed more than 230 people in the past two years.
Earlier this week, two men were arrested in Marseille whom police said had been planning an attack ahead of the election.
A machine gun, two hand guns and three kilos of TATP explosive were among the weapons found at a flat in the southern city along with jihadist propaganda materials according to the Paris prosecutor.