German police officers shoot dead knife-wielding refugee who attacked man for allegedly abusing his daughter

Berlin Police reject claims they should have shot at the man's legs

Police officers investigate the scene of the shooting in front of an air-inflated shelter for refugees in Berlin (Gregor Fischer/DPA)

Police in Berlin have shot dead a refugee after he tried to attack a man who had reportedly sexually abused his six-year-old daughter.

Officers had been called to a refugee shelter in the inner-city locality of Moabit at around 8:30pm after reports that a girl had been molested by a fellow resident of the shelter in a nearby park.

A 27-year-old suspect was arrested and put into a police car, at which point the father of the young girl tried to attack him with a knife. According to witnesses he shouted: “You won't survive this.”

After he ignored police commands to stop several officers shot him. The man, who was a 29-year-old Iraqi, was taken to the hospital with serious injuries and later died.

Since the incident, questions have been raised over whether police were right to use firearms. Berlin police union spokesman, Bodo Pfalzgraf, said the police had no option but to open fire and rejected suggestions that they should have aimed for the man's legs.

He told the BBC: “The officers had to stop people taking the law into their own hands and halt what was for them a life-threatening situation."

Berlin Police said the exact course of events and the accusation of sexual abuse of a six-year-old girl were now under investigation.

The refugee shelter in Moabit, outside which the incident took place, is the first inflatable structure for refugees in Germany and can house up to 300 people.

There have been concerns over the treatment of refugees in Germany after approximately 1.1 million people - many of them refugees fleeing from conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan - arrived there last year.

In August the company responsible for a string of asylum centres in Berlin was stripped of its contracts after its managers swapped emails joking about harming refugees.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently indicated she regretted her “open door” policy on immigration, saying she did not want “a repeat of last year's situation”.