Lifeguard Loses Foot to Shark

A lifeguard remains hospitalized in South Africa after his right foot was bitten off by what is presumed to be a great white shark.

Achmat Hassiem of Cape Town was participating in training exercises off Sunrise Beach in Muizenberg on Sunday morning when he spotted a dorsal fin slicing toward his brother, Taariq, also a lifeguard at the beach.

Achmat shouted and splashed at the surface and the shark turned toward him, grabbed him by the right leg and pulled him underwater.

“I thought the game was over,” Achmat, 24, told the Cape Times newspaper in a bedside interview Tuesday morning, before undergoing a second operation. “But as I went down I told myself, ‘No, you’re not going to die now,’ and I started kicking it.

“It had my right leg and I kicked at its head with my left leg. I don’t know how many times I kicked it, maybe four times. But I needed to get breath ... and then it let go. As I came up I saw my brother’s hand in the water and I grabbed it.”

Taariq, 17, had scrambled aboard the lifeguard boat, and he and its crew apparently rescued Achmat just in time.

The shark had circled back and rammed the vessel before disappearing. Hassiem was treated on shore by medics and airlifted to a nearby hospital.

The brothers, part of the False Bay Lifesaving Club, had been serving as in-water “patients” for those in the boat, about 600 feet offshore at a depth of less than 10 feet.

The area is not known for shark attacks, and there were calls by some in the community for a shark hunt in False Bay.

Hassiem, who said he hoped to resume his life-saving career, opposed that.

“I don’t know how sharks think,” he said. “But I do know that when you go into the sea, you are in another creature’s territory -- the shark’s home ground. He’s doing what he does naturally.”