A 16-year-old girl was killed in a suspected shark attack after she reportedly attempted to swim with dolphins in a river on the Western coast of Australia, according to reports.
At 3:45 p.m. local time, Western Australia Police were alerted to the suspected shark attack in North Fremantle, situated on the southern part of the country’s west coast in the Perth metropolitan area, 7 News reported.
The girl sustained “critical” leg injuries, according to outlet, “and despite the best efforts of paramedics she could not be saved,” after being brought to land.
Sky News reported that she was “declared dead at the scene at 6:00 p.m.”
Authorities believe the girl had been riding a jet ski with her friends when she began swimming toward a group of dolphins, per 7 News. “What we’re being advised is that (the girl) was with friends on the river. They were on jet skis, possibly a pod of dolphins were seen nearby and the young female jumped in the water to swim near the dolphins,” Fremantle district acting inspector Paul Robinson said Saturday evening. “This is an extremely traumatic incident for anyone to witness.”
A 16-year-old boy named Joshua, who was with separate a group of teens swinging into the river from a bridge rope, told WA Today that they “saw the dolphins, there were dolphins there.”
It is believed that a bull shark was responsible for the attack, per 7 News, and authorities were actively searching the waters after the incident.
The last known fatal shark attack in the Swan River occurred a century ago in January 1923, the BBC noted. The victim was a 13-year-old boy.
In 2021, there was a non-fatal attack in which a swimmer’s leg was bitten by a bull shark, “severing [his] nerves, muscles and tissue, with the sheer blood loss stopping his heart,” 7 News detailed. The victim survived without needing an amputation, though he continues to endure physical pain left by the brutal attack.
As Breitbart News noted, the first fatal shark attack of the year reportedly occurred in Mexico on January 5.