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Lifeguard Loses Foot to Shark

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Times Staff Writer

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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

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