A WOMAN swimmer was attacked and killed by a great white shark, described by rescue services as bigger than their search helicopter, off the Cape Peninsula in South Africa yesterday in full view of onlookers on the shore.

“We screamed and shouted, ‘Shark! Shark!’ towards her,” a fisherman said. He was standing on rocks with fellow fishermen at Sunny Cove, Fish Hoek, near Cape Town. He saw the shark circling Tyna Webb, 77, but she carried on swimming backstroke.

“Then it came at her, hit her in the thigh and threw her clean out of the water,” he said. “Then she was gone. By the time we ran down to warn other bathers to get out of the water, it was too late for her.”

It was the third recent shark attack. All local beaches were closed immediately.

Friends who gathered on the shore said that Mrs Webb, a mother of five children, who lived in Fish Hoek, had swum six mornings a week for the past seventeen years at Sunny Cove. They described her as fearless, fit and very independent.

“All that was left was a little red bathing cap,” said Paul Bennet, commodore of the False Bay Yacht Club, who saw the attack from his shoreline home. He said that he had been about to leave his balcony to take a shower when he saw a lot of churning in the water. He went outside and saw the shark attacking what at first he thought was a Cape fur seal.

“Then I realised it was a body being shaken violently by a large shark,” Mr Bennet said. “It then left the woman and swam away a short distance, turned, came back at great speed and hit her. Its whole mouth came out of the water and took her down. I never saw her again.”

More than a dozen people onshore saw the attack. Tim Atkins was high on a mountainside shark-spotting for a local fishing boat cruising in False Bay. “I suddenly saw a shark coming at great speed towards where the woman was swimming alone about 60 metres from the rocks,” Mr Atkins said. “The shark hardly slowed down. It just hit her and the water was full of blood. The shark turned and headed out to sea. I think it had the woman in its jaws.”

Craig Lambinon, of the National Sea Rescue Institute, said that a Bell Jetranger rescue helicopter crew spotted what they believed was the shark that had attacked Mrs Webb. “They said it was huge, more than 20ft long, bigger than their helicopter.”

The great white, which once was hunted relentlessly, is now protected in South African waters. There is controversy about whether the shark, the top predator in sub-tropical seas, is increasing in numbers, growing to a greater size and becoming bolder in its attacks on human beings.

“An attack is always a possibility,” Len Compagno, of the Shark Research Centre in Cape Town, said. “In the sea, you’re in the shark’s home, not yours. Shark attacks do happen, they have happened, they will always happen, but the apocalypse is not upon us.”

A surfer was killed a year ago by a great white and in April this year James Andrew, 16, another surfer, lost his leg to one. He survived and is surfing again with the aid of an artificial leg. Deon Byng, a leading Cape Town surfer, said: “We’ve been seeing more and more sharks here for the past couple of months ... and they’re getting bigger.”

The largest Great White caught is believed to be a 22ft female landed off Cuba in 1945. It weighed 3.6 tons and had a girth of 12ft. In August last year, conservationist Richard Peirce spent two weeks sailing off the Cornish coast in a bid to sight great whites in British waters, but was unsuccessful.

BEACH DANGER

Amanzimtoti, near Durban, South Africa. Eleven shark attacks, three of them fatal, since 1940

New Smyrna Beach, in Florida. Six shark attacks in one weekend in 2001

Suape port, Pernambuco, Brazil. Fourteen people are said to have died of shark attacks since 1990

Australia has had 132 fatal attacks in the past 200 years, the highest number of any country

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