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Tourist dies after losing her leg in shark attack while sailing off Canary Islands
A German tourist died after being bitten by a shark on Monday while sailing off Spain’s Canary Islands, the coastguard said.
The 30-year-old woman lost a leg in the attack and died of a heart attack later while being transported in a Spanish rescue helicopter, a coastguard spokesman told AFP.
She was sailing in a British catamaran in the Atlantic some 278 nautical miles southwest of the island of Gran Canaria when the shark struck. She was attacked while swimming beside the catamaran, Reuters reported.
Emergency services received an alert at 1255 GMT calling for a medical evacuation and sent a military plane and helicopter after also contacting the Moroccan coastguard.
The woman was taken on board the helicopter in the evening around 1800 GMT and was bound for hospital in the Gran Canaria town of Las Palmas when she died, the spokesman said.
Boat-tracking website vesselfinder.comindicated that the boat, the Dalliance Chichester, had left the port of Las Palmas on September 14.
Shark attacks are rare, with a total of 69 confirmed unprovoked attacks worldwide and 14 fatalities reported last year, according to the International Shark Attack File, which is administered by the Florida Museum of Natural History and the American Elasmobranch Society. The report noted that a “disproportionate” amount of people died from shark bites in Australia last year when compared with other countries, and Australia accounted for about 22% of the world’s unprovoked shark attacks in 2023.
The deadly attack comes less than a month after a shark killed a 16-year-old high school student in Jamaica.
In July, a surfer lost his leg after a great white shark attacked him in Australia. The month before that, surfer Tamayo Perry died after sustaining fatal injuries in a shark attack off the island of Oahu in Hawaii.
In January, a young fisherman diving for scallops was killed by a shark off the Pacific coast of Mexico.
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Husband of Russia’s richest woman arrested for murder after deadly shootout at offices of retail giant Wildberries
The estranged husband of Russia’s richest woman and CEO of retail giant Wildberries was arrested Thursday and charged with several crimes including murder, a day after a deadly armed raid at the company’s central Moscow offices.
Billionaire Tatyana Bakalchuk released a tearful message a day earlier, saying her husband Vladislav Bakalchuk, whom she is currently divorcing, led an armed raid into the Wildberries offices.
Vladislav Bakalchuk’s lawyers said in a message on his social media page that he was “detained for 48 hours” and charged with murder, attempted murder, assault of a law enforcement officer and vigilantism.
Two people, including a security guard, were killed in the shooting at the offices, which lie a few streets away from the Kremlin.
The incident came weeks after the company finalized a merger deal that Vladislav criticized and that strongman Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov vowed to stop.
Vladislav’s lawyers said he was on his way to a “pre-agreed meeting to settle a corporate conflict.” Vladislav alleges that it was staff at the office who fired the first shots, the Reuters news agency reported.
But Bakalchuk called her husband’s claims “absurd” and said “no one agreed to any negotiations.”
“Vladislav, what are you doing? How are you going to look in the eyes of your parents and our children?”
Wildberries is Russia’s largest online retailer. Tatyana Bakalchuk founded the company in 2004, growing it from an online clothes reseller into a major marketplace for countless other products, Reuters reported.
According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index in 2021, she was the 40th richest woman in the world and the first self-made woman billionaire out of Russia.
Tatyana Bakalchuk is the majority oner of the company, while her estranged husband holds a one-percent stake.