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.

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