A shark mauled a female swimmer in the first attack in Sydney Harbour in 15 years, officials said yesterday, sending her to hospital with a “serious” leg injury.
The predator struck on Monday evening as the woman swam off a wharf at Elizabeth Bay, less than 2km from the Sydney Opera House, police said.
The woman suffered a “serious injury to her right leg,” New South Wales police said in a statement.
Photo: EPA-EFE
It was the first shark attack in Sydney Harbour since February 2009, when a navy diver fought off a bull shark that bit him in the arm and leg in Woolloomooloo Bay.
Neighbors rushed to help the Elizabeth Bay victim, identified by the Sydney Morning Herald as 29-year-old Lauren O’Neill, a keen kayaker.
“I got home from work and sat down on the couch. I heard a soft yell for help just outside the window,” nearby resident Michael Porter told reporters.
Outside, he saw the woman trying to climb a ladder out of the water.
“Behind her was her leg, which was limp, and all completely open and full of dark red blood behind her,” Porter said. “She had obviously been mauled extremely badly by whatever shark it was that got her. We have always worried and known about sharks in the harbor. It’s only now that it feels very real.”
A veterinarian living nearby gave first aid.
The woman was in a stable condition in intensive care at St Vincent’s hospital, a spokesperson said.
She was expected to undergo surgery yesterday.
Analysis of the shark bite and of images provided by the authorities confirmed “a bull shark was likely responsible,” shark scientist Amy Smoothey said.
Sharks are more actively feeding in low light at dawn and dusk, she told Australian Broadcasting Corp, making it “potentially a high-risk time to be swimming.”
Scientists have tagged 87 large bull sharks in Sydney Harbour since 2009, said Smoothey, who works for the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries.
Tagging indicated that bull shark numbers in the harbor were at their highest this month and next month, she said.
“Shark bites are really rare, although they are very tragic when they do occur and my thoughts are with the victim,” Smoothey said. “There are very few interactions that occur in our enclosed waterways, but we know that bull sharks are one of the top three species involved in shark bites.”
In February 2022, 35-year-old British diving instructor Simon Nellis was devoured off Sydney’s Little Bay in the first fatal attack in the city since 1963.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS