A man was fatally shot on the platform of a Midtown Manhattan subway station Saturday afternoon by a gunman in a distinctive red outfit, cops said.

The victim, who was in his 30s, got into an argument with another man on the northbound E train platform at the Seventh Ave. station at 53rd St. around 12:20 p.m., who then pulled a gun and shot him once in the chest, police sources said.

Medics rushed the mortally wounded man to Bellevue Hospital in critical condition, where he was later pronounced dead. Police have not yet released the victim’s name.

The gunman ran off heading north on Seventh Ave., cops said.

Cops released surveillance photos of the shooter, whose getup bore an uncanny resemblance to the Marvel character Deadpool. He wore a black mask, a red hooded sweatshirt with a black vest over it, red pants and a black backpack.

A tourist from Washington State, who declined to give her name, had just gotten on a train with her daughter to head to Grand Central Station when she heard five gunshots ring out.

“The doors were still open,” she said. “My daughter said, ‘Oh, my God! There’s a shooter!’ She walked out (onto the platform), and she said she looked right at the guy that had the weapon, and he looked right at her,” said the woman, who added that it was her first time visiting the city.

“I started praying,” she said. “Then people started getting out and walking upstairs, and we ran out to get out of there.”

Another witness said a woman got off the train to perform CPR on the victim after he collapsed onto the platform.

“You seen a guy just go right down near the bench,” said Hassen Pinchback, a Florida resident, who is in the city to get knee surgery. “His friend, I believe it was his friend…said, ‘Come on, you’re gonna pull through this,’ as the lady was (giving chest compressions).”

When medics arrived, they jolted the man’s heart with a defibrillator, Pinchback, 63, said.

“They shocked him three times,” he said. “They put those electric things on him and never. No response. None at all.”

Connecticut resident Paul Sampson said he was on his way to a wedding in Brooklyn when the gunfire erupted, sending him and others, including small children, dropping to the floor of the uptown E train that had just pulled into the station.

“We just laid on the floor for a while, and one by one we just got up and asked each other if we were OK,” Sampson, 68, said, adding that there were young kids on the train.

“We saw the police working on the gentleman that had been shot,” he said. “They were incredible. They were performing CPR as the officers were putting him on the stretcher. They were organized. Very calm. Very matter of fact.”

After the shooting, police closed off the entire subway station for the investigation for hours, finally reopening it shortly after 7 p.m.

Sampson, who has family in the city, said the experience wouldn’t deter him from taking the subway again.

“It’s a big place. There’s lots of people,” he said. “You’re gonna have more incidents with more people, so I’m not afraid to take the subway. In fact, I’m getting on at the next station so I can make it to the wedding on time.”

The woman visiting from Washington said the shooting only reinforced that “you need to be very aware of your surroundings at all times” in the city.

“I guess it was a New York experience,” her daughter added.

Gabriel, 30, who was walking on crutches on the sidewalk outside, was among the straphangers inconvenienced by the station’s lengthy closure after the shocking daytime shooting.

“It’s a bit annoying. It just means we’ll have to go to another station. It’s tragic,” he said of the transit killing, “but at the same time, like, people are dying all over the country. So this is just another, like — what’s the word — pointless death.”

Food vendor Francia Anabela Acosta, 58, who was selling peanuts outside the station, said she was overwhelmed seeing medics carry the victim outside and desperately perform CPR on him, to the point she picked up her cart and moved away from the scene.

“I go over there. It’s too much for me,” Acosta said. “It’s New York. It’s every day, something happen.”

Acosta, who lives in New Jersey, said while medics were furiously pumping the man’s chest, she saw a woman weeping, who she assumed knew the victim.

“I see the woman cry,” she said.

Investigators are certain it wasn’t a random attack, but at this point don’t know if the men knew each other or simply were strangers who got into an argument, cops said.

No arrests have been made.

As of Oct. 11, there have been six murders in the NYC transit system so far this year, a 50% increase compared to four murders in the subway for all of last year, police said. In 2024, there were 10 murders in the subway system. According to the NYPD, in terms of overall crime, 2026 so far is the second safest year in the transit system in the last 15 years, excluding the pandemic.

However, through this Oct. 11, felony assaults in the subway are up nearly 12% and overall crime in the transit system is up 1.6%

Anyone with information regarding this incident is urged to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477).