Police shot dead a man armed with an Uzi-style sub-machinegun after he threatened a member of the public.

The victim, aged about 40, was challenged by armed police in a quiet Kent village at the weekend and shot twice when he refused to give himself up. Investigators are now trying to establish whether he had deliberately provoked officers into killing him - an act known as “suicide by cop”.

It has been suggested that the man called the police himself and then calmly waited for them to arrive in Stansted, near Sevenoaks.

Just before he was shot dead on Saturday morning the man, who has not yet been identified formally by relatives but is from Kent, is believed to have connected a hose to the exhaust of a white Mitsubishi car and put it into the driver’s window.

Police were called to the village after receiving reports of a man armed with a gun, described as an Uzi. They found the white car parked in a field off a quiet lane and the man a few hundred yards away. Two officers found the armed suspect and police marksmen were sent.

A spokesman for the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which is investigating, said that early accounts show that the officers challenged the man before firing two shots, both of which hit him. Paramedics were requested and gave first aid but the man was pronounced dead at 8.57am. The two firearms officers have been moved to nonfirearm duties as is usual in these circumstances.

A police source said: “It is felt that everything was done by the book by the officers during this incident.”

The firearm was recovered from the scene and was last night being examined to establish whether it was a real weapon or an imitation.

Anne Roberts, 60, landlady at the nearby Black Horse pub, said that she thought the dead man could have been a customer the night before.

“He never got drunk and was very well spoken and well turned-out. He said that he was on a trip down memory lane as he used to live around here when he was a child but had moved away,” she said.

“But some things that he said did not stack up - he said that he was staying in a bed and breakfast in a road nearby but I know there aren’t any B&Bs there.

“A colleague who spent a lot of time talking to him said she thought he looked troubled and she asked him if anything was wrong but he said nothing was wrong. He said that he was very unhappy where he was living but he lived there because he worked there as he could get better money there than here. I think he said he was an electrical engineer. He was here when I called last orders and he asked for a double vodka but he was well mannered and polite. Throughout the evening he must have had about eight vodkas but was not drunk.”

She added that a couple out horseriding had seen a white Mitsubishi car with a pipe going from the exhaust to the driver’s window. “There were police officers in white suits examining the car. It was later taken away by police on the back of a tow truck.”

An IPCC spokesman said that the dead man was from Kent but not Stansted. He was not thought to have held a firearms licence or been a member of a registered gun club.

It is the second fatal police shooting in the Sevenoaks area this year.

Ann Sanderson, 37, a store manager, was killed by police in the town centre in June. She was shot dead in a car park in the early hours of the morning after police had received 999 calls of a woman waving a gun around. Her death is still being investigated by the IPCC.

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