Over the weekend, two women were killed by sharks in Egypt’s Red Sea. This led officials to close off a part of the coast.
In a statement released on Sunday, the Egyptian Ministry of Environment said that a shark attacked the women while they were swimming in the Red Sea near the resort town of Hurghada. According to the ministry, Maj. Gen. Amr Hanafi, who is in charge of the wider Red Sea Governorate, has given an order to stop all water activities in the area of the deadly attacks.
The ministry said that a group of experts has been put together to look into what happened and if there are any scientific reasons for it. The group “is still finishing its work” to figure out why the shark that attacked the two people did what it did, according to the ministry.
It wasn’t clear if both attacks were done by the same shark. “The Ministry of Environment regrets the accident and sends its deepest condolences to the families of the two people who died. It also sends its sincere thanks and appreciation to everyone involved for their help,” the ministry said.
The ministry did not tell anyone who the two women were. ABC News was told by a representative of the Austrian Foreign Ministry that an Austrian citizen from the western state of Tyrol had died in Egypt.
The Austrian embassy in Cairo is in touch with the victim’s family and the Egyptian government, a spokesperson said. The spokesperson would not give any more information because of “reasons of data protection and confidentiality.”
In recent years, there haven’t been many shark attacks along Egypt’s Red Sea coast. In 2020, a shark attacked a 12-year-old Ukrainian boy snorkeling off the coast of Sharm El-Sheikh, another Red Sea resort town. The boy lost an arm, and the tour guide lost a leg.
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