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

The 30-year-old German lost her fight for life in a Spanish Air Force helicopter as she was being evacuated to a Gran Canaria hospital. She was officially pronounced dead after arriving at Doctor Negrin Hospital in the Gran Canaria capital Las Palmas on Monday night.

She is said to have had her leg bitten off by the shark as she was on a catamaran in international waters 278 miles south-west of Gran Canaria’s airport and around 110 miles east of the city of Dakhla in the disputed territory of Western Sahara which is currently occupied by Morocco.

The catamaran she was a crew member of has been named as British-flagged vessel Dalliance Chichester, which had left the Spanish holiday island on September 14. Spanish Coastguards are said to have informed their Moroccan counterparts as well as UK coastguards because of the origin of the catamaran.

Spanish coastguards reacted by alerting nearby vessels about the emergency. One ended up approaching Dalliance Chichester to give other crew members medicine for the injured woman.

But according to local reports Moroccan authorities refused to transfer the injured woman to Rabat for emergency medical treatment. The unnamed woman was pronounced dead yesterday just after 11pm after going into cardiac arrest in the Spanish military chopper. The shark attack is understood to have happened around 4pm the same day.

There have been no documented previous shark attacks in the area where yesterday’s incident took place.