Culprits Hunted After Death of Australian Surfer

A surfer has been killed by sharks off the coast of Western Australia, sparking a hunt for the animals suspected of mauling the man to death at the weekend.

Bradley Smith, 29, was killed on Saturday off Left Handers beach, a popular surfing spot in the Margaret River wine-growing region.

Mitch Campbell saw the event and told reporters that Mr Smith had fought with the sharks for nearly a minute before he was brought to shore mortally injured with a 60cm (2ft) bite in his surfboard.

"This guy started shouting and I looked over and there was two sharks just like thrashing around. And then we saw a guy scrambling around and saw him clinging to the shark and stuff trying to, like, whack it, and trying to get away, and then they just kept coming back for more."

A boat and helicopter scoured the area from dawn to dusk yesterday without finding any sign of the sharks. Fisheries officer Tony Cappelluti said they would try to spot them from the air and herd them out to sea with the boats.

"Unless there's some sort of immediate threat we want to just get it away from areas where it's going to come up against humans," he said. Great whites have been protected in Australia since 1997, and can only be killed if they pose a direct threat to humans.

Mr Smith's brother Stephen told reporters that the family had viewed his body in the hospital and said that the animal should not be killed. "We're very close and we're quite shocked, and we're still in the process of coming to grips with what's happened," he said.

The reported size of the sharks - one witness said they may have been as much as five metres long - has prompted marine biologists to speculate that they could have been great whites.

However, the habit of hunting in packs is characteristic of bronze whalers, a dangerous species common in Australian waters.

Mr Cappelluti said Left Handers beach was closed after the attack, but that some ardent surfers were still back in the water yesterday. "We can't do anything to stop people going in the water if that's what they want to do," he said.

Australia-wide, 24 people have been killed by sharks in the past 20 years, all but six of them in Queensland and South Australia. The last fatal attack was on Queensland's Gold Coast last year, when a pensioner was killed by a bull shark while swimming in a canal linked to the sea.

Vic Hislop, a former shark hunter from Queensland who claims to have caught thousands of the animals in his lifetime, blamed the great white's protected status for encouraging shark attacks on humans.

"Sharks are changing their diet and it's putting people at risk. If you thin out the ocean of fish and protect the top of the food chain, soon the top of the food chain is going to start looking for different food," he said.