COPENHAGEN (AFP) - Copenhagen police said on Sunday that they believe a man shot dead by officers was the sole perpetrator of two fatal attacks in the Danish capital.

Police said video surveillance indicated the man was behind an attack at a panel discussion about Islam and free speech in which one man died on Saturday and the shooting of another man outside Copenhagen's main synagogue early Sunday.

"We believe the same man was behind both shootings and we also believe that the perpetrator who was shot by the police action force at Noerrebro station is the person behind the two attacks," Torben Moelgaard Jensen told a press conference.

Lars Vilks, the Swedish cartoonist whose controversial caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed sparked worldwide protests in 2007, had been among the speakers at the Krudttoenden cultural centre when a man opened fire. A 55-year-old man was killed when the gunman sprayed bullets at the cultural centre, while a young Jewish man was gunned down outside the synagogue.

The man shot dead by police on Sunday was said to be Jewish.

He "may have been inspired by the events that took place in Paris a few weeks ago," Jens Madsen from the Security and Intelligence Service told reporters, referring to the Islamist attacks in the French capital a month ago.