UPDATED
A swimmer or snorkeller has died and another was injured in an encounter with a shark near the Red Sea resort town of Marsa Alam yesterday (29 December).
According to the Egyptian environment ministry, the victims were both tourists and the incident occurred off a jetty “in deep waters outside of the designated swimming area”, thought to be near a resort between Marsa Alam and Port Ghalib.
Also read: Egyptians race to react to fatal shark incident
The ministry emphasised that swimming out too far beyond the pontoon was prohibited, and that the structure would now remain closed until at least 1 January while the situation was assessed. General guidance on staying close to jetties in the area would be related to currents.
No details were provided about the tourists involved in the incident, although the AFP news agency has reported that according to a foreign office source both were Italian males, the fatality a 48-year-old from Rome and the other aged 69. According to unconfirmed reports they were father and son.
The two were recovered from the water and taken to a hospital in Port Ghalib.
UPDATE: The two men were later identified as Gianluca Di Gioia and Peppino Fappani.
Di Gioia, 48, lived in Paris and worked at the European Commission research centre and the EU diplomatic arm the European External Action Service. Fappani, 69, a dental technician from Cremona, had sustained bites on his arms and legs in the incident but was reported to have been discharged from hospital following treatment.
They had been on a group trip to Egypt to celebrate Di Gioia’s birthday the previous week, and their wives had witnessed the incident from the Sataya Resort jetty, alerting Egyptian rescuers to dispatch a boat.
According to one report by Italian news agency ANSA, the men had been scuba diving rather than snorkelling, and the shark responsible had been identified as a tiger.
Such incidents are relatively unusual in the Red Sea and yesterday’s is the first reported since the death of a 24-year-old Russian snorkeller in Hurghada in June 2023. That encounter was reportedly with a tiger shark, but there is no information about the species involved in the recent incident.
In 2022 an Austrian and a Romanian tourist died in what were also concluded to be tiger shark encounters that occurred 200m apart off a Hurghada beach.
The environment ministry said that an emergency committee was being set up to investigate the Marsa Alam incident, in collaboration with the Red Sea Governorate.
Also on Divernet: Tiger shark death in Hurghada, Deaths blamed on female tiger shark
