The Miami Beach Police shot dead a man who, at knifepoint, was holding a woman inside a Victoria's Secret store, on the tourist street of Lincoln Road, local media reported this Friday.

The event occurred on Thursday afternoon, when the agents were alerted to an incident inside this premises located in one of the main commercial arteries of the South Beach neighborhood, according to the police of this city in South Florida (USA).

Upon arrival at the store, police found a man holding a knife to a woman's throat and ordered her to drop the weapon, the police agency reported on Twitter.

In view of his refusal, an officer shot him in the head.

The man, whose identity has not been released, was later taken in critical condition to a local hospital where he died from the gunshot around midnight.

Witnesses told the local channel WPLG that the man was holding two women hostage, apparently a mother and her daughter, and had been discovered stealing from the well-known women's underwear store.

“He saved the life of the young. It was heroic,” Robert Hernandez, president of the Miami Beach Fraternal Order of Police, told the Miami Herald about the officer who shot the suspect and who, he added, “had to make a split-second decision.”