A shark that mauled a Russian national to death in Egypt last week will end up as a museum exhibit, a top Egyptian oceanography researcher told the local Cairo24 news media outlet on Sunday.
Scientists will mummify the predator and place it in the Marine Biology Museum in the Egyptian city of Hurghada once they finish their research on the creature, professor Amr Zakaria Hamouda, the head of the National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries said.
According to Hamouda, the institute initially planned to study and treat the fish before releasing it. He did not elaborate why the scientists had changed their decision. According to Egyptian media, the predator was injured but still alive when it was caught.
Videos that surfaced on social media, however, showed a crowd of fishermen dragging the shark to shore. Some of them were seen beating the predator as it resisted capture. The footage does not show whether the shark was killed by the fishermen and Hamouda said only that scientists had dissected its corpse.
On Tuesday, he said that the research team had finished studying the shark, and that their conclusions as to why it attacked a human would be revealed later at a special public press conference. The scientist maintained that such sharks do not usually feed on humans and the one in question had changed its behavior due to some “external influence.” Hamouda insisted that the attack was a rare case, adding, however, that similar incidents do take place every year.
The tragic incident involving a Russian national took place on June 8. According to the Russian Consul General Viktor Voropaev, the shark zeroed in on the 23-year-old Russian near ‘Dream Beach’ in Hurghada, on the Red Sea. According to Russian diplomats, the deceased was not a tourist but had lived in Egypt for some time.
Some “control” measures are now being put in place to prevent such attacks from taking place in the future, the scientist said. A similarly tragic incident happened in Hurghada last summer. In July, two women from Austria and Romania, respectively, were killed in shark attacks on the same day, south of the resort city.
