French railway police on Monday shot and seriously wounded a man wielding a fake gun who had been spraying swastikas at a busy Paris train station, prosecutors and a police source said.

A second man, a taxi driver, was hit in the foot by a stray bullet and taken to hospital.

An officer opened fire when the man who was spray-painting swastikas at Austerlitz station in the southeast of the capital appeared to brandish a handgun and refused to comply with instructions, a police source told AFP. Prosecutors said the weapon turned out to be fake.

He was later declared brain dead, the Paris prosecutor's office said.

A woman who witnessed the incident but did not want to give her name told AFP she had been sitting at the entrance of the station at the time.

"I heard shooting and people screaming," she said, adding that the police arrived "immediately."

The woman said she had initially thought it was an argument between two taxi drivers "but people were quite scared, some were running", she said.

The officer who fired his weapon was in custody while the incident was being checked, prosecutors said.

At least 34 people, including two babies were killed when a contraband fuel depot exploded into flames in southern Benin near the border with Nigeria on Saturday.

According to Beninese Interior Minister Alassane Seidou, “a serious fire occurred in the town of Seme Podji. Another 20 people were seriously wounded in the incident.”

"I can't really give you the cause of the fire, but there is a large gasoline warehouse here and cars, tricycles and motorcycles come from morning to evening,” he added.

Nigeria is a main oil and gas producer where fuel smuggling is very common along its borders, particularly when the government maintains a subsidy to keep fuel prices low.

The majority of the victims were burnt and they could not be not be identified.

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