A 30-year-old German woman is dead after she was attacked by a shark while she was serving as a crew member on a catamaran flying under a British flag. The woman, who has not been named, was pronounced dead the evening of September 16.
She was taken to a hospital in the Canary Islands in a helicopter flown by the Spanish Air Force after the attack but did not survive.
Reports indicate that a shark took off one of her legs while she was on the boat about 280 miles southwest of the Gran Canaria airport. The region of international waters the boat was traveling in was about 110 miles east of the city of Dakha, which is in a disputed region that Morocco is currently claiming belongs to that country.
The catamaran was the Dalliance Chichester, a British-flagged ship that departed from the Canary Islands on September 14. The Spanish Coast Guard sent an alert to both their Moroccan and UK counterparts given the boat’s flag and the proximity to Morocco.
Some local media reports claim that Moroccan officials declined to move the badly injured woman to Rabat, Morocco’s capital, for hospital treatment. No details about this alleged decision are available.
The woman was still alive when she was placed in the Spanish chopper, but her heart stopped being in flight just after 11 pm local time. The shark attack occurred about seven hours earlier. The Dalliance Chichester sent a Mayday signal at 3:55 p.m.
The Spanish Coast Guard sprang into action and called up nearby boat to tell them of the emergency. One of these raced to the catamaran and delivered medicine to those tending to the injured crew member. She was aboard the Spanish helicopter by 8 p.m.
So far there are no details on exactly why and how the attack happened, nor about what type of shark may have killed the woman. She was apparently in the water swimming next to the boat when it occurred. There are no prior documented shark attacks in the region of the ocean in which the catamaran was sailing.
