THE CYPRUS Tourism Organisation (CTO) yesterday expressed surprise at British tabloid claims that a Great White Shark was causing panic and chaos on the beaches of Larnaca.
The article in the Daily Star was titled “Great White Shark is terrorising Jordan’s holiday hideaway” – referring to the wife of Cypriot pop singer Peter Andre.
The couple have reportedly bought a £3.5 million mansion in Larnaca that former Page 3 girl Jordan, real name Katie Price, has painted pink inside and outside. The couple and their children are due to holiday on the island in the coming weeks.
According to other reports, Andre is already on the island preparing for the arrival of the family.
The Daily Star claimed it could “exclusively reveal” that a five-metre long Jaws lookalike was “lurking off the coast where busty Kate Price, 29, and singer husband Peter Andre, 34, have built a £3.5 million pink pad.”
“And your intrepid Daily Star tracked down the beast, which has been causing chaos at beaches across Cyprus,” it added.
It quotes “a source” on the island saying: “Everyone is running scared of the Great White Shark, and when Kate and Peter hear I’m sure they will be too.
They won’t want their children in the water if there is a shark on the loose.
“We found the five-metre monster, which overshadowed even the shark lurking off the Spanish coast.”
But Glafcos Kariolou the official responsible for beaches at the CTO, was stunned by the story, given that no one else appeared to have heard anything about a large shark terrorising the beaches of Laranca. He said the CTO would check it out.
“This sounds like nonsense,” he said. “We do fish some sharks but they are only found in very deep waters around 15 or 20 miles off the coast.”
Kariolou said as far as he knew Cyprus had never seen a Great White, although it was theoretically possible. “We have no reports about such a sighting and we have people all over.” This included not a single report from any lifeguards.
The Daily Star said tourists in Cyprus were already “reeling from the terror of three shark sightings in the last week.”
But Kariolou said even if this was true, it was common in Cyprus for people to mistake a dolphin’s fin for a shark fin. “This is not unusual in Larnaca Bay,” he said.
Referring to the Daily Star article, he said it was “unbelievably vague and unprofessional and could be damaging to tourism”.
“I will try to find out what’s going on,” he said.
The Daily Star said its reporter went out in a boat with a local fisherman and threw octopus in the water to lure the shark out of hiding.
“For several heart-stopping moments I watched as it circled our tiny fishing vessel. The boat’s flimsy wooden hull did not seem strong enough to withstand an attack and I did not want to test it. Eventually, as the monster started closing in, the fisherman revved up the engines and decided we had seen enough. The Great White followed us part way back to the resort of Larnaca,” said the report.
British tabloids have been on shark alert all summer, after a local paper published a picture of a Great White allegedly swimming off the coast of Cornwall.
Media coverage of the Great White scare was fierce, with the Sun running a series of articles on shark fever engulfing Britain and offering every Sun online reader a free Jaws ring tone.
The man who took the picture eventually admitted it was a hoax. “I took it whilst I was on a fishing trip in Cape Town and just sent it in as a joke,” he reportedly told a second Cornish paper. “I didn’t expect anyone to be daft enough to take it seriously.”
