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adding that while most tourists were refusing to go to Sharm El Sheikh, others had actually contacted the company to see if package holidays there were now cheaper.

      Despite determined efforts to stress the rarity of shark attacks in the Egyptian waters, this was no consolation for holidaymakers or those endeavouring to bring an end to it all. ‘We are monitoring the situation very closely and working together with all authorities to ensure the safety of all members and visitors in the Red Sea,’ said Hesham Gabr, chairman of Egypt’s Chamber of Diving and Watersports (CDWS), ‘Our thoughts are with the victims and their families.’

      No one could have imagined that worse was yet to come.

      Desperate not to lose vital tourist trade – up to five million holidaymakers every year – the authorities knew they must hunt down the killer. But was it one main predator or more? Some had witnessed the Oceanic Whitetip in action; others reported seeing the Mako shark. The CDWS stated that it was ‘working continuously with all the relevant authorities and shark experts to try to resolve this situation in the most appropriate and safe way for all concerned.’ Furthermore, it was calling on the help of experts to ‘form an advisory team on the best course of action’ following the Naama Bay incident. In other words, it was time to bring in the heavy mob. Three shark experts from America were flown in to Sharm El Sheikh – Dr. George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research and curator of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History; Marie Levine, head of the Shark Research Institute at Princeton, and Ralph Collier of the Shark Research Committee.

      ‘When you have these many shark attacks in such a short period of time, there must have been something to incite it,’ pronounced Dr. Burgess. ‘It does not conform to normal shark behaviour in the least bit.’ Collier said: ‘I have been working in the field of shark interaction since 1963 and this is the first time I have ever seen injuries this severe and this localised as far as the area of the body that was bitten is concerned. We always hear that sharks like human flesh, but of course that is not true. Sharks don’t like humans – it’s as simple as that.’ Back in the US, a fourth expert – shark behaviourist Erich Ritter – was on hand to advise from his research centre.

      ‘My job was to figure out why,’ he said. ‘Every wound tells a story. Sharks’ teeth are like fingerprints. They are identifiable to a specific species based on the shape and the function of the tooth. Mako sharks have sharp, pointed teeth which slash through their prey, whereas Oceanic Whitetips have serrated teeth which leave a straight cut in their victims. What this told me was that most wounds were inflicted by an Oceanic Whitetip, but one person was actually bitten by a Mako shark.’ All of which surprised Ritter. ‘Humans are not the normal prey of sharks – we are terrestrial animals, we don’t live in the ocean. Sharks feed on things they see and live with every day in the marine environment. We are not on the menu. If they are showing up in shallow waters, then there must be a very powerful trigger.’

      It was a view shared by diving instructor Marcus Maurer, who said that although the powerful Oceanic Whitetip was indigenous to the Red Sea, thousands of divers had encountered them without any problems: ‘I have now had more than 3,000 dives and I have never had a problem with them. This is a really unusual event. I think the chance of dying by an aeroplane accident is much bigger than getting involved in a shark attack. The instructors and divers who come here are actually looking for sharks because we love them. And that is really, really, an excellent experience for everybody.’

      Yet another shark expert – Samuel Gruber, head of Miami’s world-famous Bimini Biological Field Station – described the attacks as ‘unprecedented’. He said: ‘A shark in one day bit more than one person. In all my years reading about sharks and writing about them, you never hear about sharks biting more than one person, then for it to happen the next day is almost like a Jaws’ scenario. Finding the shark is pretty much a crapshoot – it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.’

      Gruber said such frenzied feeding is normally reserved for shipwreck survivors. The most infamous took place during World War II when the Nova Scotia – a steamship carrying around 1,000 people – was sunk near South Africa by a German submarine. With only 192 survivors, many deaths were attributed to the Whitetip. Packs of sharks moved in for the kill and those on rafts could only look on in horror as their fellow passengers, desperately thrashing about in the water, were eaten alive. Sergeant Lorenzo Bucci recalled: ‘A lone swimmer would appear, then suddenly throw his arms in the air, scream and disappear. Soon after, a reddish blob would colour the water.’ Later, around 120 corpses washed up on Durban’s beaches. And on 30 July 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed, with many of the 800 sailors on board succumbing to shark attacks, as well as exposure. In fact, the Oceanic Whitetip is responsible for more fatal attacks on humans than any other species combined. There were five such recorded attacks in 2009.

      Meanwhile, back at the Rea Sea and events of 2011, some expressed cynicism about the intervention of high-profile experts. One dive-centre owner observed: ‘Why did they need to import all these specialists merely to come up with the same explanations that we all had from day one?’

      More help came from a Swedish vessel surveying the waters around the resort to try and track any shark movements. The authorities closed all Sharm El Sheikh’s beaches and all diving and watersports activities were suspended. Now the once tourist-thronged beaches were virtually deserted, although perhaps surprisingly consent was still given for experienced divers to enter the Red Sea. But even venturing to ‘safe’ locations ended in fear for some intent on hitting the waters. London financier Nick Treadwell visited the national marine park of Ram Mohammed, where he set off on a boat trip in a party of ten snorkellers. Treadwell was one of two who decided to go scuba diving. The morning’s dive was idyllic, but the second one was certainly not. Treadwell was down about 14m (46ft) when his instructor noticed a stray piece of equipment below them and dived for it, before flinching in shock on his way back up. Above the scuba divers and below the snorkellers a large shark, more than 2m (6.5ft) long, slowly encircled the group. Treadwell later told the Guardian newspaper that after it was brought to his attention, he went ‘calm – very calm’ as he watched the instructor freedive down a few metres and then begin corkscrewing to the surface, blowing bubbles, in an attempt to scare the shark away: ‘He went to the top and shouted, “Shark, shark, shark – everyone get to the reef!” Everyone started swimming as fast as they could because the reef was too shallow for the shark, so it would be a safe place. But there was an older lady, probably in her late 60s, who was slightly hard of hearing and she was delayed. The shark started coming towards her, and she ended up kicking it in the face a couple of times and using her underwater camera to whack it over the head. She got away, but she had cuts all over her legs. I don’t know whether the shark had actually bitten her, but they looked like lacerations – almost like injuries from where she’d kicked the shark in the teeth.’

      Dr. Mohammed Salem, marine biologist and director of South Sinai National Park, stressed that it was wrong for people to assume sites like Ras Mohammed were safe: ‘It is a misunderstanding when people think that the words “National Park” mean that it is a place that is absolutely protected from human activities. I tell them this is wrong.’ In fact Salem was one of the few to be open about the reality of shark attacks in the Red Sea, admitting that between 1996 and 2009 there were 12 attacks recorded, the latest bringing the number to 17. However, he added, ‘This is a very small number compared to other attacks in other countries like the USA and Australia. Also, regarding the very high number of snorkellers and swimmers coming every year to the area, we find this number is slight.’ He added that the recent attacks had occurred from north Naama Bay to Ras Nasrani, just by Shark’s Bay, and ‘had our attention because naturally, sharks fear human contact because they don’t know what they are so [they] are careful when they come close to them. The other observation was realising that the attacks were in the day while naturally, sharks hunt only during the period between sunset and dawn. The question is what made these sharks in this specific area change their behaviour and attack.’

      Meanwhile, the hunt for the killer – or killers – went on. Beliefs about the shark attacks still differed, though, with one senior government official stating: ‘It is clear now that we’re

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