A woman has died following a shark attack on a British-flagged catamaran while she was being rushed to a hospital in the Canary Islands. The 30-year-old German lost her battle for survival in a Spanish Air Force helicopter during her evacuation to a hospital in Gran Canaria. She was officially declared dead upon arrival at Doctor Negrin Hospital in Las Palmas, the capital of Gran Canaria, on Monday night. Reports indicate that the shark bit off her leg while she was aboard the catamaran in international waters, located 278 miles southwest of Gran Canaria’s airport and about 110 miles east of Dakhla, a city in the disputed Western Sahara currently occupied by Morocco. The catamaran, identified as the British-flagged Dalliance Chichester, had departed from the Spanish holiday island on September 14.
Spanish Coastguards reportedly notified their Moroccan counterparts and UK coastguards due to the catamaran’s nationality. However, local reports suggest that Moroccan authorities declined to transfer the injured woman to Rabat for urgent medical care. The woman, who remains unnamed, was pronounced dead just after 11 PM due to cardiac arrest in the Spanish military helicopter, following the shark attack around 4 PM that day. A Mayday call from the catamaran is said to have been made around 3:55 PM. Spanish Coastguards responded by alerting nearby vessels of the emergency, and one vessel approached Dalliance Chichester to provide other crew members with medical supplies for the injured woman. She boarded the Spanish Air Force helicopter shortly after 8 PM. It is not yet clear how the attack occurred, and there have been no recorded prior shark attacks in the area where the incident took place. The Dalliance Chichester is reported to be a pleasure craft measuring 17 meters in length and 8 meters in width.