A shark killed a German tourist who had been swimming near the shore at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, days after a string of attacks injured several divers, Egypt health officials said.
The body of the 70-year-old woman was washed onto the shore.
Egypt imposed a 48-hour ban on swimming in part of the waters off Sharm el-Sheikh after four divers - three Russians and a Ukrainian - were injured by shark attacks last week.
It was unclear whether the woman, who has not been named, was inside the area where swimming had been banned.
Shark attacks are extremely rare in Sharm el-Sheikh, one of Egypt's most popular holiday destinations, but international media attention raised concerns they may affect tourism, an important source of employment and foreign exchange.
‘It is unusual to have four attacks in a week,’ said Rolf Schmid, manager of the Sinai Diver's Centre.
‘The attack happened in a shallow area called Middle Garden north of Naama Bay, and the whole area hasn't had sharks for the past 10 to 15 years.’
The environment ministry said on Thursday that it had caught and killed the two sharks behind the attacks on the divers. But a marine NGO then said they had killed the wrong sharks.
The Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA) said that photographs of the dead sharks and pictures of the attack shark taken shortly before one of the attacks showed they were not the same fish.
The NGO said shark attacks were ‘extremely rare’ and warned against ‘randomly catching and killing’ large oceanic sharks in the area. The recent attacks were probably carried out by a single shark behaving abnormally, it said.
The last death from a shark in Egypt was in June 2009, when a French woman was attacked while diving at Marsa Alam on the southern Red Sea coast.
