A tragic incident occurred off the coast of Hurghada, Egypt, where a Russian man died after being attacked by a shark. This event has prompted authorities to take action and has raised concerns about safety in the popular Red Sea resorts.
Tiger Shark
Details of the Attack
On Thursday, a Russian man was mauled by a shark off one of Egypt’s Red Sea resorts. Egypt’s Environment Ministry reported that the man was killed after being attacked by a tiger shark in the waters near the city of Hurghada.
A video circulating online purportedly shows a man thrashing about in the water before being repeatedly attacked by a shark circling around him, then being dragged under.
The Russian Consulate in Hurghada identified the man as a Russian citizen. Russia’s Tass state news agency said the person killed was a Russian man born in 1999 who lived in Egypt full-time and was not a tourist.
Read also: Shark Attack Aftermath in Hurghada
A diver who arrived on the scene just after the attack said people had rushed to help the victim after a lifeguard from a nearby hotel raised the alarm, but were not able to reach him in time.
Immediate Response and Actions Taken
In response to the attack, authorities closed off a 46-mile (74km) stretch of the coastline, announcing it would remain off-limits until Sunday. The ministry later said it had caught the shark and was examining it in a laboratory to try and determine the reasons for the rare attack.
The Russian consulate urged Russian tourists to be vigilant when in the water and to strictly adhere to any swimming bans imposed by local authorities, in a statement posted on its official channel on the Telegram messaging application.
Historical Context: Shark Attacks in the Red Sea
Shark attacks are rare in the Red Sea coastal regions. However, in 2022, two fatal attacks occurred in Hurghada within days, killing an Austrian and a Romanian tourist.
Egypt’s Red Sea resorts, including Hurghada and Sharm el-Sheikh, are popular with European tourists and boast some of the country’s most renowned beach destinations. Divers are attracted by the steep dropoffs of coral reefs just offshore, which offer a rich and colourful sea life.
Read also: Shark Attack Investigation: Sharm El Sheikh
The 2010 Sharm El Sheikh shark attacks were a series of attacks by sharks on swimmers off the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. On 1 December 2010, three Russians and one Ukrainian were seriously injured within minutes of each other, and, on 5 December 2010, a German woman was killed when she was attacked while wading and snorkeling in the shallows close to the shoreline.
Map of Sharm El Sheikh
In response to the attacks, beaches in the popular tourist resort were closed for over a week, dozens of suspected sharks were caught and killed, and the local government issued new rules, regarding the banning of shark-feeding and restrictions on swimming.
The first attacks occurred on 1 December, when four people were attacked within minutes of each other in the Ra's Nasrani area. 48-year-old Olga Martsinko suffered wounds to her hands and legs, lower back and buttock while 70-year-old Lyudmila Stolyarova lost her right hand and left leg. Both had to have their injured limbs partly amputated.
Lyudmilla Stolyarova's husband Vladimir said: "I ran up to her and could hear her gasping 'Shark! Shark! Shark!' She somehow managed to push the shark away from her. The shark bit off her arm, but she managed to swim closer to the shore. Before she got out of the water, the shark attacked again and bit off her foot."
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Other witnesses described the attack on Olga Martynenko. "The woman managed to swim to the pier, but when people on the pier started pulling her out of the water, the shark bit off the woman's left buttock," one said. "She lost a lot of blood. There were tourists on the pier, and they helped to pull the woman out. Some of them were slapping the shark off with rubber fins. There were no rescuers on the pier during the moment when it all happened. A rescuer was running up to us from afar. There were neither cords, nor stretchers at hand.
A barman witnessed one of the victims "running from the sea with blood streaming from gashes in his leg." The other male victim had to be rescued by members of a local diving centre. According to the barman, "the sea went red..."
Specialists from the Egyptian environment ministry were called in to investigate the incidents and caught a 2.25 metres (7.4 ft)-long oceanic whitetip shark weighing 150 kilograms (330 lb) that was claimed to be the one responsible for the attacks.
Mohamed Rashad, a bartender at the al-Bahr beach restaurant who was working at the time of the attack, said: "All the people ran away back to the hotel, no one wanted to stay on the beach. Now it's very quiet. People are scared to come to the beach. They are just coming to the bar to have a drink.
Following the attacks, watersports activities were again suspended, though it was expected that scuba diving-which is considered to be at far less risk from shark attacks-would soon be allowed to resume.
Only nine attacks by oceanic whitetips had been reported worldwide in the last 430 years and only one had been previously fatal.
The chairman of the Shark Trust, a British charity dedicated to shark conservation, commented: "It is probable that the tragic attacks were triggered by a specific activity or event..."
The chairman of the Sharm El Sheikh Chamber of Diving and Water Sports (CDWS) suggested that attacks might have been due to overfishing, which is an ongoing problem in the area.
On 9 December 2010, an international team of experts announced that it had found that two species-makos and oceanic whitetips-had been involved in the attacks.
Egyptian television broadcast claims from South Sinai governor Mohamed Abdul Fadil Shousha that Israeli divers captured a shark with a GPS unit planted on its back, allegedly by Mossad.
How To Stay Safe While Swimming With Sharks
Impact on Tourism
The attacks had a drastic effect on the local tourist industry. Egypt has in recent years sought to revive the vital tourism sector, hurt by years of political instability, the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
The Egyptian authorities reopened the beaches on 4 December following the capture of the sharks.
The attacks also sparked conspiracy theories about possible Israeli involvement.
Sharks are commonly seen near Sharm El Sheikh but attacks on humans are very rare, particularly by the two species implicated in the 2010 attacks.
A variety of theories were proposed to explain the attacks, including overfishing in the Red Sea, causing increased hunger and aggression in the sharks, as well as the illegal, intentional or inadvertent feeding of fish close to shore (which produces scents that attract sharks).
Jochen Van Lysebettens, of the Red Sea Diving College, saw the attack, and told Sky News: "Suddenly there was a scream of help and a lot of violence in the water.
The attacks were widely described as "unprecedented" both in media reports and by Samuel H.
Despite the greater notoriety of other sharks habitually found nearer the shore, the oceanic whitetip is believed to be responsible for many casualties as a result of predation on survivors of shipwrecks.
Such incidents are not included in common shark-attack indices for the 20th and 21st centuries, and as a result of this, the oceanic whitetip does not have the highest number of recorded incidents; only 5 recorded attacks as of 2009.
Other hypotheses for the shark attacks include that cattle ships transporting sheep for slaughter during the Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha on 16 November dumped sheep carcasses into the Red Sea, bringing sharks unusually close to the shoreline.
Tiger sharks are large species that reside in tropical and temperate waters.
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