WATANI International
12 December 2010
A killer shark which mauled a 70-year-old German woman to death last Sunday, and had five days earlier attacked three Russians and a Ukrainian off Sharm al-Sheikh coast, aroused a serious guessing game as to its origin and behaviour.
The German swimmer’s body was washed ashore on Sunday; the shark had taken a chunk out of her right thigh and bitten through her right elbow. On the Tuesday before, three Russian tourists were seriously injured, one losing a foot and one of his hands. A third attack later prompted the authorities to shut the beaches, warning people not to go into the sea.
Hasty opening
A hunt was conducted for the suspect sharks, dumping raw liver into the sea as bait. One day later, the Environment Ministry said that two sharks had been captured, a mako shark and an oceanic whitetip. A picture was released but it was quickly pointed out that at least one of them did not match the tourists’ descriptions of the attacker; they had already shot a photograph of the shark right before the attack.
The waters were later re-opened, only for the German tourist to be killed on Sunday. The waters closed again. But just 24 hours later, as business dried up at watersports centres across Sharm al-Sheikh, Tourism Minster Zuhair Garana said diving would be allowed. “I cannot say that deep waters are completely secure,” he said, “but shallow waters are a 100 per cent secure.”
Guessing game
Local diving experts say single shark attacks are extremely rare in the area and are mystified as to why so many people were attacked in such quick succession. “We’ve seen more attacks in a few days than in the previous 15 years,” said Florian Herzberg, dive operations manager at the Reef 2000 centre in Dahab resort north of Sharm. “It could be a shark with behavioural problems that was deliberately fed different things and now associates humans with food.” There are claims tourist boats are illegally dumping meat into the water to attract sharks for passengers wanting to photograph them.
Some environmentalists believe overfishing and a declining ecosystem could be driving sharks closer to shore in search of food. Some said sharks had been drawn to shallow waters after sheep being shipped in for last month’s Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice, or Eid al-Adha, had died and were thrown overboard.
Others suggested it could have been part of a secret plot by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency.
“There is not one reason that will be ignored. We are seeking any reason that causes a change in shark behaviour,” Ahmed al-Edkawi, assistant secretary for the South Sinai region, said.
Egyptian TV Channel II’s highly-viewed talk show Masr Ennaharda (Egypt Today) hosted the head of Sharm al-Sheikh divers, who said that an Israeli colleague had contacted him a week before the shark incident and warned that they had spotted a killer shark in Eilat. He said he reported the warning to Sharm al-Sheikh authorities but nothing was done.
Immigrant shark
The Environment Ministry assigned a committee of marine environment professors in Egyptian universities to investigate the matter, while the hotel and water sports owners in Sharm al-Sheikh brought in American experts to clear up the riddle. They are George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File in Florida, Marie Levine, head of the Shark Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey; and Ralph Collier, author of Shark Attacks of the Twentieth Century.
Magdy Tawfiq Khalil, Professor of marine environment at Ain-Shams University’s Faculty of Science and manager of the nature reserve centre at the same university, told Watani that Red Sea sharks do not normally attack humans; the rogue shark must have swum in from the Indian Ocean. Why this happened, Dr Khalil says, is not entirely clear. It may be that the shark lost its way or, more seriously, that it swam into new territory because its original ocean habitat had changed sufficiently to drive it out to look for territory which offered more generous food supply. In all cases, he says, sharks do not swim solo but move in groups of some four or five. So even if a shark is caught, there will be others out there that also need to be hunted.
Dr Khalil believes the rogue shark is probably a tiger or a whitetip shark.
Fears for tourism
Millions of tourists visit Egypt’s eastern coastline of the Red Sea every year seeking sun, sand and diving. Tourism accounts for 12.6 per cent of jobs in Egypt.
Water sports centres say business dried up after officials banned snorkelling and swimming, leaving tourists with little to do but speculate over the cause of the attacks.
The attacks grabbed the attention of world media and raised fears of a long-term hit to a tourism sector that is a lifeline for the Sinai Peninsula population and the biggest foreign currency earner for Egypt.