US Secret Service kills man trying to access Trump's Florida estate

U.S. Secret Service agents fatally shot a man armed with a shotgun who breached the security perimeter of President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Trump was in Washington at the time of the incident, which officials said happened around 1:30 a.m. (0630 GMT).

The suspect, a man in his early 20s, was spotted by the north gate of the Mar-a-Lago property, carrying a shotgun and a fuel can, the Secret Service said.

Agents confronted the man and told him to disarm, but he raised his gun.

"The only words that we said to him were 'drop the items,'" Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw told reporters.

"At which time he put down the gas can, raised the shotgun to a shooting position," Bradshaw said.

A deputy and two Secret Service agents then shot him. The man was pronounced deceased, and no U.S. officers were injured.

The Secret Service said no one under its protection was present in Mar-a-Lago at the time.

Bradshaw, the Palm Beach sheriff, identified the shooter as 21-year-old Austin Tucker Martin, a resident of a small town in North Carolina about 700 miles (1127 kilometers) north of Mar-a-Lago, according to the Washington Post.

Martin was an illustrator of landscapes and golf courses, and had an older sister who died three years ago at the age of 21, though obituaries did not provide a cause of death, the Miami Herald reported.

AFP