The assailant being taken away in a stretcher after he shot himself . Photo credit: New York Post

Two New York police officers were shot dead in Brooklyn on Saturday, officials said, in what local media called an apparent ambush and a revenge killing.

The shootings come amid anger over the chokehold death of an unarmed black father-of-six by a white police officer, and a grand jury’s decision not to press charges against him. Local media said the assailant was also dead.

The shooting was also linked to the police killing of another black man, Michael Brown.

Garner, an unarmed father of six, died after police held him in a chokehold while he was being arrested for selling illegal cigarettes in New York last July.

Brown, an 18-year-old in the Ferguson suburb of St Louis, Missouri, was shot dead by a police officer in August, sparking months of protests.

Grand jury decisions not to indict either white officer responsible triggered mass protests in New York and other US cities.

“It’s an execution,” one law enforcement source told the New York Post.

The identities of the killed cops were being withheld pending family notification of their deaths.

According to New York Post, the police officers were working overtime as part of an anti-terrorism drill when they were shot point-blank in their heads by the lone gunman, who approached them on foot from the sidewalk at the corner of Myrtle and Tompkins avenues in Bed-Stuy.

“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today,” a person believed to be the gunman wrote on Instagram in a message posted just three hours before the officers were shot through their front passenger window.

The post included an image of silver automatic handgun with a wooden handle. Another post showed camouflage pants and blue sneakers which matched the clothing the dead gunman was wearing as his body was carried from the scene on a stretcher.

“They Take 1 Of Ours … Let’s Take 2 of Theirs,” the post continued, signing off with, “This May Be My Final Post.”

The gunman was a fugitive who had just murdered his girlfriend in Baltimore Saturday morning, sources told The Post.

Minutes after shooting the two officers, he, too, was dead.

He fled to a nearby subway station, the G-train station at Myrtle and Willoughby avenues, where, as pursuing cops closed in, he shot himself on a crowded platform, sources told The Post.

“They engaged the guy and he did himself,” one investigator said of the gunman’s demise.

Civil rights activist Al Sharpton, who has used Garner and Brown’s deaths to campaign for sweeping police reform, said he was outraged by Saturday’s killings.

He said his National Action Network saw non-violence as the only way to fight for justice.

“An eye for an (eye) leaves the whole world blind. We all at NAN express our prayers and condolences to the families of the 2 NYC officers,” he wrote on Twitter.