Walter Finch
A GERMAN woman has died in an ambulance helicopter after being attacked by a shark in the Atlantic Ocean.
The victim, 30, was sailing on a British-flagged catamaran in international waters when the shark struck her leg while she was swimming.
The crew of the Dalliance Chichester made an emergency distress call to the Spanish Salvamento Marítimo at 3.55pm on Monday afternoon.
Dakhla, some 180km away on the coast of former Spanish colony Western Sahara, was the nearest city when the attack occurred.
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Spanish maritime authorities in turn alerted their nearest counterparts, the Moroccan coastal rescue in the capital city of Rabat. They also informed the British coast guard as per protocol.
However, according to atlantichoy.com who first reported the incident, Rabat refused to offer assistance to the stricken vessel.
Instead, Spanish maritime authorities scrambled an air ambulance from the Spanish air force along with a support plane from the Canary Islands, some 514km away.
In the meantime, a nearby merchant ship arrived on the scene to deliver medical supplies to the woman after an SOS signal was sent out.
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The helicopter arrived around 8.05pm and took the woman, who had lost a leg, en route to hospital in Gran Canaria.
However, she went into cardiac arrest and was admitted to hospital at 11.05pm having died during the flight.
The catamaran had left the port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on 14 September and had been on a route heading south.
No previous attack has been recorded in the region where the attack occurred.
The nearest attack was reported in the African archipelago of Cape Verde.
This attack counts as the first death by shark attack in the waters around the Canary Islands in history.
There have been six previous attacks since records began in the 16th century but none of them fatal.
