According to authorities, the teenager was swimming in the Swan River in Perth in the west of the country when she was bitten by a shark and suffered serious injuries. She was pulled ashore and pronounced dead after attempts at resuscitation failed, said Paul Robinson, Fremantle Borough Police Inspector.
The girl was in the North Fremantle district with friends on the river, Robinson told journalists. The teenagers went jet skiing. “Apparently there was a group of dolphins nearby and the young woman jumped into the water to swim near the dolphins,” he said.
It was a “very traumatic incident” and the girl’s family, who came from Perth, was “completely shaken”.
It was initially unclear what kind of shark it was. According to experts, it’s completely unusual for sharks to be in this area of the river, Robinson said. The government called on the population to exercise caution in the river itself and on nearby beaches.
Most recently, in February 2022, a 35-year-old British diving instructor was killed by a shark off Little Bay Beach in Sydney. The last fatal shark attack on an Australian river occurred in 1960, when a 11-foot-long bull shark attacked a diver off the Roseville Bridge in central Sydney, according to data from the Taronga Conservation Society.
