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The two victims - one aged 17 and the other 20 - suffered gory injuries, two police sources said, saying one had her throat slit while the other was stabbed in the stomach. According to Reuters, three police sources said the suspect had shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest) as he carried out his attack at Marseille's main railway station. The attack was described as "frenzied" by an unofficial police source. Two police sources said the attacker had been carrying a butcher's knife, was around 30 years old and of North African appearance. One of the sources said no identification papers were found on him.

NC One man has been killed by a knifeman in Marseille

Some 200 police officers had cordoned off the area and all roads were closed to traffic, with security forces saying the operation was still ongoing on Sunday afternoon. The French prosecutor has confirmed the attack, and both deaths, at the Saint Charles station as he makes his way to the area. Police have described it as an "ongoing" incident and asked people to avoid the area which has now been evacuated. Samia Ghali, lawmaker for the Marseille region, told France Bleu Province radio: "If the military had not been there, we would have had a lot more deaths."

Twitter Marseille terror: Armed officers guard the station after man stabbed many people

The Paris prosecutor opened a counter-terrorism probe. "We have generally avoided these sorts of attacks in Marseille," regional president Renaud Muselier, who was speaking from the site of the killings, told BFM TV. "I think the security services responded extremely quickly. It's difficult to do more because when you see the distance between the two bodies and the attacker it's only 10 metres, so they intervened quickly." The SNCF railway operator urged people to avoid all travel to the transport hub. Some 200 trains have been diverted or are waiting at regional stations. Security forces have increasingly been targeted by militants who have carried out several knife attacks on them, most notably in June 2016, when a Frenchman who pledged allegiance to Islamic State stabbed a police commander to death outside his home and killed his partner.

Twitter Armed soldiers shot a man dead after he rampaged through a train station