Investigations are underway in New Caledonia to find the body of a fisherman who, according to witnesses, was the victim of a shark attack, rescue services said Thursday.
Two fatal attacks have already taken place since the start of the year in the South Pacific archipelago.
Read also: New Caledonia: a fisherman bitten by a shark two days after a fatal attack
"
Our boat is still there but nothing has been found and no one has yet gone to the police or the gendarmerie to report a disappearance,
" Alexandre Rossignol, communications manager, told AFP. civil security.
The alert was given on Wednesday by fishermen who told the emergency services that they had witnessed a shark attack on an underwater fisherman "
sunk to the bottom
" off a beach in Nouville, a peninsula to the north. west of Noumea. “
It was very quick. We saw eddies on the surface, it was a shark that was attacking it (...) We saw the flapping of the fins above the water and then nothing more
”, told them. witnesses daily
Les Nouvelles-Calédoniennes
.
Significant air and sea assets were deployed but the search was unsuccessful, the local government said in a statement.
The town hall of Nouméa has issued a decree prohibiting swimming and nautical activities in the coastal strip of 300 meters of this area located on a peninsula, until Sunday included.
For its part, the Southern Province authorized for 72 hours within a radius of one nautical mile around the site of the alleged attack the collection of bulldog sharks and tiger sharks.
Several sharks have been captured, including a 4.30 meter tiger shark, and will be autopsied.
At the end of April, in this same area of Nouville, a 53-year-old man was found dead on his water sports board, after being bitten by a shark in the leg, while in February a boater was fatally attacked in the 'Îlot Maitre, a very touristic site off the coast of Nouméa. Two suspicious disappearances at the beginning of the year, for which the hypothesis of a shark attack is not ruled out, are also the subject of investigations by the Nouméa prosecutor's office.
