Two women were killed in separate shark attacks in Egypt’s Red Sea, south of the city of Hurghada, which has prompted Egypt’s Red Sea Governorate to an order to shut down several Red Sea beaches.
According to the National News, the body of a Romanian tourist in her late forties was discovered hours after an attack that left a 68-year-old Austrian woman dead. Both attacks happened within 600 metres of each other, off the coast of Sahl Hasheesh. Egypt’s Environment Ministry said on Sunday that a team of experts was trying to establish “scientific” reasons for the attacks.
A video clip posted online, purportedly of the attack on the Austrian tourist, shows holidaymakers watching from a pier as a shark attacks a woman close to the beach. The authenticity of the clip could not immediately be verified. In 2020, a Ukrainian boy lost an arm and an Egyptian tour guide a leg in a shark attack.
READ: Tourism: Killer Whales are responsible for the disappearance of The Great white Sharks in South Africa says experts
A Czech tourist was killed by a shark off a Red Sea beach in 2018, three years after a German tourist died in a shark attack. In 2010, a spate of shark attacks killed one European tourist and maimed several others in Sharm El Sheikh, a popular resort on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, across the Red Sea from Hurghada.
Egypt’s Red Sea resorts are among the country’s major beach destinations and are popular with European tourists. Divers are drawn by the steep drop-offs of coral reefs just offshore that offer a rich and colourful sea life. Authorities have in recent years sought to revive the vital, labour-intensive tourism industry, battered by years of instability following a popular uprising in 2011 and later by the coronavirus pandemic and the fallout from the war in Ukraine.
Egypt relies heavily on tourism revenue from the Red Sea region, which draws about 65 per cent of all tourists arriving in the country.
