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Police shot a man who threatened to detonate a bomb Thursday night on the Gallivan TRAX station platform in downtown Salt Lake City.

Officers responded to a call of a bomb threat at 9 p.m. and found a man on the light-rail station platform, said Salt Lake police Lt. J.R. Nelson. The man seemed upset and claimed to have a bomb in his backpack.

KUTV Channel 2 News reported that the man called the station at 9:10 p.m., saying he was wired with explosives.

Nelson said police didn't know if there really was a bomb but closed the area bounded by 200 to 400 South and State Street to West Temple while they negotiated with the man. A SWAT team also was near the station.

Detective Mike Hamideh said the man broke off negotiations with police at 10:50 p.m. About 10:55 p.m., the man began walking toward officers. The officers gave him commands, but the man ignored them. The officers felt their lives were in danger and shot the man, Hamideh said.

Hamideh was not sure how many shots were fired by officers or how badly the man was injured.

The Salt Lake City bomb squad used two robots to pick up the man's bag. The bomb squad detonated the bag and will determine if there really was a bomb. Once the potential bomb was removed, medics attended to the injured man, who was later transported to a hospital, Hamideh said. He didn't know the man's condition.

The blue and green TRAX lines were prevented from traveling to the Gallivan station, Nelson said. UTA was shuttling train passengers around the road closures.

Some businesses also had been evacuated.

Mark Benson and Merilee Allred sat about five feet from the man when they tried to catch a TRAX train after dinner at a downtown restaurant.

They said he was angry and arguing with someone on his cellphone. He was fiddling with papers and his backpack and saying that the Drug Enforcement Agency was at his house, the couple said.

"He seemed like he was at the end of his rope," Benson said.

When he got off the phone, the man began to talk to the couple. In his hand he had some sort of trigger mechanism connected to a wire that stretched into his backpack.

"He said, 'I have a detonation device,' and that 'some shit was about to go down,'" Benson said.

"We were afraid he was going to get on the train and blow it up, so we ran across the street and called police," Allred said.

Police arrived shortly after, and the couple watched the rest of the action from a short distance away.

Mark Browarsky was walking past the station when a middle-age man in a white shirt on the platform started ranting, claiming he was going to blow himself up.

The man was complaining about how unfair life was and that he might have to go to jail, Browarsky said.

About five minutes later, he said, the police showed up and began cordoning off the area.