A 30-year-old woman dies after being bitten by a shark on the leg while on a British pleasure boat in the Canary Islands

A woman has died after being attacked by a shark on a British-flagged catamaran while being rushed to hospital in the Canary Islands.

The 30-year-old German lost her fight for her life in a Spanish Air Force helicopter while being evacuated to a hospital in Gran Canaria.

She was officially declared dead after arriving at Doctor Negrín Hospital in the capital of Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, on Monday night.

The shark is said to have bitten his leg while he was on a catamaran in international waters 278 miles southwest of Gran Canaria airport and about 110 miles east of the city of Dakhla, in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, currently occupied by Morocco.

The catamaran the crew was on was named Dalliance Chichester, a British-flagged vessel that had left the Spanish resort island on September 14.

The Spanish coastguard is said to have informed their Moroccan counterparts, as well as the UK coastguard, about the origin of the catamaran.

But according to local reports, Moroccan authorities refused to transfer the injured woman to Rabat for emergency medical treatment.

The unnamed woman was declared dead yesterday shortly after 11pm after suffering cardiac arrest in the Spanish military helicopter. The shark attack is believed to have happened at around 4pm the same day.

The catamaran is said to have sent out a distress signal at around 3.55pm yesterday.

The Spanish coastguard reacted by alerting nearby vessels about the emergency and one of them ended up approaching the Dalliance Chichester to deliver medicines to other crew members for the injured woman.

He boarded the Spanish Air Force helicopter shortly after 8:00 p.m.

It was not clear this afternoon how the attack occurred. There have been no previous documented shark attacks in the area where yesterday’s incident occurred.

Dalliance Chichester is a 17-metre long and eight-metre wide pleasure craft.