Witnesses described the chaos at Stockwell Tube station today after a man was shot dead fleeing from armed police.
Scotland Yard have confirmed they shot a man and he was pronounced dead at the scene. The south London station is now closed and cordoned off.
Witness Mark Whitby, speaking to BBC News 24, reported the man was shot five times at close range after he had jumped on to a Northern line train soon after 10am.
Mr Whitby said he was sitting on the Tube train reading his paper as it was stationary with its doors open in Stockwell station, and that he heard people shouting "Get down, get down!"
He said: "An Asian guy ran on to the train. As he ran, he was hotly pursued by what I knew to be three plain-clothes police officers. He tripped and was also pushed to the floor and one of the officers shot him five times.
"One of the police officers was holding a black automatic pistol in his left hand. They held it down to him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it. He's dead, five shots, he's dead," Mr Whitby said.
"I'm totally distraught," he said. "It was no more than five yards away from where I was sitting as I saw it with my own eyes."
He continued: "As the man got on the train I looked at his face. He looked from left to right, but he basically looked like a cornered rabbit, like a cornered fox. He looked absolutely petrified.
"He sort of tripped but they were hotly pursuing him and couldn't have been more than two or three feet behind him at this time. He half-tripped, was half-pushed to the floor.
"He looked like a Pakistani but he had a baseball cap on, and quite a thickish coat. It was a coat like you would wear in winter, a sort of padded jacket. Maybe he might have had something concealed under there, I don't know," Mr Whitby said.
"But it looked out of place in the weather we've been having. He was quite large, big built, quite a sort of chubby guy."
Another passenger called Chris Wells said he was travelling on the Victoria line towards Vauxhall when he left the train at Stockwell.
He saw about 20 police officers, some of them armed, rushing into the station before a man jumped over the barriers with police giving chase.
Journalist Chris Martin said he was waiting on the northbound Northern line platform at Stockwell station and a train had pulled in when several men burst on to the platform about 20 yards from him.
"There was a lot of shouting, I thought it was football fans or something," he said. "There was obviously some sort of altercation going on, and then they came flying on to the platform and these guys just threw this man into the open doors of the train.
"Then I heard shots, I thought it was three, but someone else said five.
"It sounded like a silencer gun going off, and then there was blind panic, with people shouting and screaming and just running away.
"I didn't actually see the gun, but I heard this `bang, bang, bang'. When I left the station a guy called Mark who had been on the train said they had shot the man dead, no doubt about it," he said.
A large area around Stockwell Tube station, an interchange for the Northern and Victoria lines in south London, was cordoned off and traffic approaching the area ground to a halt.
Tube services on the Victoria and Northern lines were suspended following a request by the police, London Underground said.
A London Ambulance Service spokesman said an air ambulance, an ambulance and a duty station officer had been sent to Stockwell after an emergency call.