Man shouting 'Allahu Akbar' shot dead outside police station in Paris

Police in Paris have shot dead a knife-wielding man who tried to enter a police station on the anniversary of deadly Islamist militant attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine.

The man was reportedly seen running towards the police station before he was shot, in what is believed to have been a foiled terrorist attack.

The French interior ministry said the man could be heard shouting 'Allahu Akbar' before he was shot.

"The man may have been wearing something that could be a suicide belt," Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet told BFM TV. Brandet later confirmed to Reuters that the suicide belt was fake.

A witness told AFP he had heard "two or three shots" in the incident.

The shooting came as France held official ceremonies marking a year since a jihadist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

President Francois Hollande addressed a gathering of anti-terror security forces at Paris's police headquarters.

The January 7 shootings at the Charlie Hebdo offices, which left 12 dead, were followed by an unprecedented series of killings in subsequent months that culminated in Islamic State attacks on Paris that left 130 dead.

In Thursday's incident, the man tried to force his way into the police station in the 18th district in northern Paris, an area that Islamic State said it had been planning to hit as part of the November attacks, Reuters reported.

"According to our colleagues, he wanted to blow himself up," an official at the Alternative Police union said. "He shouted Allahu Akbar and had wires protruding from his clothes. That's why the police officer opened fire."

Officials said bomb disposal experts were on site.

Journalist Anna Polonyi, who could see the outside of the police station from the window of her flat, posted photos on social media that showed what appeared to be a bomb-disposal robot beside the body.

She told Reuters that her sister, in the flat with her, had seen the incident happen. She said the police shouted at the man and that he then started running towards them before they shot him.

In his speech commemorating the Charlie Hebdo killings, President Hollande called for greater cooperation between the security services.

"Faced with these adversaries, it is essential that every service - police, gendarmerie, intelligence, military - work in perfect harmony, with the greatest transparency, and that they share all the information at their disposal," the president said.

Many of the jihadists in both January's rampage and the attacks in November were known to French security services, having either travelled abroad to fight with extremists or been prevented from doing so.

Hollande said that since the attack on Charlie Hebdo, nearly 200 people in France had been placed under travel restrictions to prevent them joining up with IS in Syria or Iraq.

The president said the three police officers killed in January's attacks "died so that we could live in freedom".