A TOURIST was mauled to death by a shark at a busy beach that had just re-opened following another horror attack.
The 59-year-old Australian man was swimming close to a pontoon around 500ft from the beach on the South Pacific paradise island of New Caledonia when he was bitten several times on his arms and legs.
Horror CCTV footage shows the man splashing in the water as the shark attacks.
Two people on a nearby jet-ski rushed him back to the beach, where emergency services tried to save him.
The attack happened at the Chateau-Royal beach just south of the capital Noumea at around 4pm on Sunday.
At the same beach a 49-year-old swimmer was seriously injured last month and a surfer attacked a few days ago.
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It’s emerged the shark may have been attracted to the beach by food tossed into the water from a nearby restaurant’s viewing platform.
The man killed was understood to have been to have been travelling alone and was staying at nearby Le Meridien Hotel.
“It happened so close to shore, the poor victim was face down in the water when the jet ski got to him,” a guest at nearby Hotel Chateau Royal told Daily Mail Australia.
“There was blood everywhere, we could see it from the beach.
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"So many people were in the water at the same time and they’d only reopened the beach a few days ago.”
After the attacked terrified swimmers rushed back onto the beach and police evacuated the area.
Noumea’s mayor, Sonia Lagarde, ordered the closure of most beaches in the area and the capture of tiger sharks and bull sharks in nearby waters.
Drones were deployed to track them and two were sighted before operations were suspended at nightfall, police said.
The prosecutor said an investigation would shed more light on the circumstances of the attack, which happened inside the zone watched over by lifeguards.
New Caledonia is a French territory that lies 750 miles east of Australia.
It ranks 13th in the world for the total number of shark attacks, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History, which has kept a tally of worldwide shark attacks since 1958.
The attack comes after Stella Berry, 16, was killed by a shark when she went swimming with friends in the Swan River, Perth.
The shark appeared from the murky river waters and dragged her under the surface as terrified friends watched on.
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In 2016, an Australian kite surfer was killed in a shark attack there.
David Jewell, 50, had fallen off his board when the shark attacked, biting his right leg while he was inside the reef of Kouma and he then suffered a heart attack.
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