"The man did have a belt, but it was a fake. All the shops have closed their shutters and everything is locked down".

France has been under a state of emergency since a series of attacks claimed by the Islamic State group killed 130 people in Paris on November 13, and tensions increased this week as the anniversary of the January attacks approached.

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 the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) said it had been planning to hit as part of the November attacks.

Officers shot and killed a knife-wielding man with wires protruding from his clothes at a police station in northern Paris on Thursday, French officials said, a year to the day after an attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo launched a bloody year in the French capital.

The surrounding neighbourhood was cordoned off and two schools were sealed off.

An official says the man shot dead in front of a Paris police station rushed up to officers at the entrance, threatening them with a knife, and was immediately shot dead.

"We must be able to force these people -and only these people - to fulfil certain obligations and if necessary to put them under house arrest... because they are risky", he said. The attack Thursday came as France marks one year since Islamic extremists attacked satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be publicly named according to police policy.

Hollande had said earlier that a "terrorist threat" would continue to weigh on France. Another official told the Associated Press that Paris police were investigating the incident as potential "terrorism".

Two schools were under lockdown, and police cleared out hundreds of people in the area.

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

An armed man has been shot dead by police in Paris after trying to enter a police building in the city on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The widow of Franck Brinsolaro, the bodyguard who was killed in the attack, said this week she has filed a lawsuit claiming that he was left vulnerable because the security around the newspaper had been reduced before the shootings.