Washington : Police have shot dead a man wielding an axe, a replica handgun and pepper spray at a movie theater near Nashville, in terrifying echoes of two previous cinema shootings.

   With only the attacker killed and three others hurt, authorities said the outcome could have been much worse, hailing the rapid response of police who were at the theater in mere minutes. The man, who police identified as 29-year-old Vincente David Montano, also wore a backpack that was strapped to the front of his body and wore a surgical mask, perhaps to protect himself from the chemical spray.  It later transpired that he was carrying an airsoft pellet gun, not a real gun, although police did not know that at the time. The backpack, it turned out, contained what Nashville police chief Steve Anderson called “a device configured to look like an explosive. It was not.”