By the time Olga made it to the pontoon to be dragged to safety by shocked tourists, she had lost a chunk of her right thigh and buttock; her hand and arm were also missing. The waters were red with her blood and still more poured from her appalling injuries.
Olga’s daughter gave her own emotional account: ‘We were only 30 feet (9m) away from the jetty and could easily see the other people on the beach. My mother suddenly disappeared under the water and I saw the shark swirling her down. When she came up again, the shark let go and she shouted “Spasite, akula!” (“Help me, shark!”) If she had not swum fast with her flippers, she would have lost her legs as it chased her to the jetty.’
Olga was flown to Cairo’s Nasser Institute Hospital, where the surgeon on duty, Dr. Mohamed Dahi, was shocked at the severity of her injuries – ‘I walked into the emergency room and when I saw the victim, I found her arm was amputated up to the elbow. I saw the wound at the back of her. It was about 40cm (16in) by 50cm (20in).’
Just minutes after the attack on Olga there was a second one. At 2.55pm, another Russian woman, Lyudmila Stolyarova, was swimming close to the shore and the pontoon, and well within the buoy area. She felt something brush against her and assumed it was a diver coming to the surface of the sea. But it was a shark: ‘It swam between me and the sea shore, so you see I had nowhere to go,’ said Lyudmila. ‘It started to swim in circles around me, in circles, and right then it started – started to attack me. It bit my arm off. It bit it off! I lifted my arm up in the air and started screaming “Help, shark!” Only when they started hauling me onto a boat did I realise my leg was bitten off.’
Meanwhile, her husband Vladimir, 72, had been forced to look on helplessly. ‘I looked up and there – oh no! People were carrying my wife on a sun bed and the ambulance was waiting. It was such a horror. What I saw there when she lifted her arm, I won’t describe all the horrors, the torn wounds.’ The special holiday break the couple had been enjoying to celebrate Lyudmila’s 70th birthday ended in a nightmare, with Vladimir’s pleas to his wife not to go into the water because he felt uneasy proving justified. Diving instructor Hassan Salem, who had been on the dive, told how he was circled by the shark before it attacked the victims: ‘I was able to scare the shark away by blowing bubbles in its face, but then saw it swim to a woman and bite her legs,’ he said.
Lyudmila, too, was a victim of an Oceanic Whitetip and was also rushed to the Cairo hospital. Again, Dr. Dahi was confronted with the devastation caused by a shark on the human body: ‘She had an amputated arm and an amputated leg. At our hospital we have experienced injuries caused by sharks. They were mainly caused by small sharks – not like this. This time it looks to be a large shark, I feel there is a problem in the sea.’
The next day, Wednesday, 1 December at 10.55am, Ukrainian snorkeller Viktor Koliy, 46, was attacked within minutes of jumping from the pontoon in Shark’s Bay. But it was this attack that made the authorities realise that not one, but two species of shark were preying on humans. This time the attacker was a Mako shark. Yet, like the Oceanic Whitetip, it was far from its deep-sea home and had strayed into shallow waters. Koliy’s arm was torn and he was pulled from the water, the haemorrhaging from his injuries turning the sea red again.
Just five minutes later, 54-year-old Russian marine captain Yevgeniy Trishkin became the next victim to be savaged in a shark’s jaws; not those of the Mako, but an Oceanic Whitetip. His left arm was torn off from below the elbow and his other hand mauled as he swam near Naama Bay on the third day of his holiday. Like the other victims, Trishkin had been swimming in the ‘safe’ area marked for swimming. Children had been playing in the water and there were no warning signs about the threat of sharks.
Afterwards Trishkin recalled: ‘At the end of the pontoon there was a sharp depth increase and the colour of the sea gets a much darker blue, almost black. I swam into this and by the time I saw the shark, it was too late. It came from the deep and was the same black colour as the sea; it bit and started chewing my left arm. I hit it with my right arm while it continued to eat the left away. I hit its nose several times and for a second it opened up its jaws, but only to bite my other hand. It was a huge creature. The people on the jetty heard my cries and came to rescue me just as I was losing consciousness. They dragged me out of the water.’
His ordeal was witnessed first hand by British holidaymakers Jim and Joanna Farr, who had been snorkelling over the coral reef. Before swimming away in terror, they quickly took photographs of the attack, which identified the Oceanic Whitetip shark as the one responsible for previous attacks because it had the same chunk missing from its dorsal fin. Jim, 58, had actually been bumped by the shark before it made its way to its victim. He remembered: ‘We were in the water, just swimming along quite casually when we came across an area which was a diving pontoon. Below us was the coral reef and three divers or four divers down there; you could see all the bubbles, but it was as clear as anything. It was wonderful, fish galore. Two guys jumped off the pontoon just in front of us and they swam past me. As they swam past, I felt this bang on my back – I thought they had jumped off the pontoon on top of me. But I looked up and could see the pontoon was about ten feet away from me.’
Jim and his wife Joanna, 42, were dragged to safety in a boat. Joanna takes up the story: ‘The snorkel guide took his snorkel out and shouted “Shark, shark! Get out the water now! We were about twenty or thirty metres from the boat and we literally just had to swim for it, knowing there was a shark in the water. There was screaming and shouting; people just went wild. Everyone was in shock. You could see blood pouring through the pontoon, staining the water red. The guy next to him had his head in his hands because he had just witnessed it all. People were screaming and they were still pulling people out of the water. Some were running along the platform to the safety of the shore and people on the beach had run back in terror, standing 10m (33ft) from the shoreline to get as far from the water as they could. There was total panic. Our guide told us he had seen a 3.5m- (11ft) long shark in the water and pointed to the Oceanic Whitetip in my fish guide. They took us away from the scene as quickly as possible and tried to convince us it was probably someone who had cut themselves on the coral but we knew it was a shark and nobody wanted to get back in the water.’
Jim adds: ‘I could see the guy being pulled up onto the pontoon. There was blood everywhere, blood squirting everywhere – it was like a war scene.’ The couple literally had to swim for their lives. ‘It was only when we got back [that] we heard the shark had attacked several swimmers and realised what a close shave we had had,’ said Joanna. Among the photographs they took were some that showed blood pouring off the pontoon as Trishkin was pulled to safety.
Local diving instructor Marcus Maurer helped with the rescue. ‘There was a lot of blood. I saw the shark stay there for a while and we started the rescue situation. A lot of people had been carrying the man up, so we gave him oxygen support and we brought him directly to hospital. Usually we do not see sharks. We have lots of people during the year snorkelling, swimming and diving at this place. You do not see sharks because they are shy animals.’
Mohamed Rashad, a barman at the nearby al-Bahr beach restaurant was one of those who could only look on in horror as those in the water attempted to flee to safety. ‘The sea went red!’ he said. British holidaymaker Nina Dydzinski, 46, from Wigan, Lancashire was relaxing on the beach when she heard the shouts – ‘I had just come in from the water, where I’d been snorkelling close to the beach. I heard a man shouting. Everyone panicked.’ Her husband, Jarostaw, 49, was lucky to escape. He was in the water when the hysterical cries rang through the air, but managed to scramble to safety. ‘Everyone was just trying to climb onto the jetty,’ he said.
No wonder tour operators reported a significant drop in the number of Russian tourists making their way to Egypt. ‘There