Foreign tourists in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

A shark attack on Sunday killed a 52-year-old German tourist in an Egyptian Red Sea resort, in the first such incident in five years, police said.

The attack in which the shark sheared off the German’s leg took place off Al-Qusair.

It was the first fatal shark attack in Egypt since a string of maulings in 2010 that killed a German woman and wounded three Russian tourists in another Red Sea resort.

The Red Sea is home to several species of shark, but the type believed to have been behind the 2010 attacks was the oceanic whitetip common to the region.

The attacks in 2010 forced the government to close off a stretch of beach in the Sharm el-Sheikh resort for a week.

In 2009, a shark killed a French woman off another resort close to where the German tourist was attacked on Sunday.

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