A German tourist has died after being attacked by a shark in Spain’s Canary Islands. The 30-year-old lost a leg in the shark attack and died in a rescue helicopter on Monday evening, the Coast Guard announced on Tuesday.
The German was traveling on a British catamaran when the attack took place. Shark attacks are very rare in this area.
The German tourist was traveling on the British catamaran “Talion’s Chichester” about 500 kilometers southwest of Gran Canaria when the accident happened, a coast guard spokesman told AFP news agency. According to ship-tracking website vesselfinder.com, the 17-meter “Talion’s Chichester” left the port of Las Palmas on Saturday.
According to reports, Spanish authorities were notified at 2:55 p.m. that a “medical evacuation” was necessary. After they alerted Moroccan rescuers, they decided to send a helicopter and a Spanish military plane to assist the catamaran crew.
At 8pm the seriously wounded German was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Las Palmas, the capital of the Canary Islands. However, along the way, the 30-year-old suffered a heart attack.
The Canary Islands are a group of islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of Africa. Shark attacks are very rare here. “Unprovoked” shark attacks worldwide increased by 2023, according to a study by the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File Database. According to this, there were 69 unprovoked shark attacks last year, and 63 in 2022.
More than half of all shark attacks last year occurred off the coast of the United States. Last year there were a total of ten deaths: four in Australia, two in the United States, one each in the Bahamas, Egypt, Mexico and the French overseas territory of New Caledonia. (AFP)
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