Updated May 24, 2026 — A 39-year-old man spearfishing with three friends was killed by a shark on Sunday at Kennedy Shoal on the Great Barrier Reef, Queensland police said. The group was diving from a boat off the coast south of Cairns when the man was attacked, Police Inspector Elaine Burns told reporters.
Witnesses on the boat pulled the victim from the water and brought him by boat to the nearby tourist town of Hull Heads around noon, where paramedics were waiting. An ambulance service statement said he had sustained injuries not compatible with life and died from a critical head injury. Police said the person who pulled him from the water was close enough to have seen the attack; Burns said the friends were likely to be traumatized by what they witnessed.
Kennedy Shoal is a shallow coral reef popular with recreational fishers and divers attracted to the 19th-century shipwreck Lady Bowen. Authorities have not yet confirmed the species of shark involved, although local fishers reported sightings of bull sharks in the area prior to the attack.
The incident is the second fatal shark attack in Australia in just over a week and the country’s third shark-related death so far this year. On May 16, 38-year-old spearfisher Steve Mattabonni was fatally mauled at a coral reef off Rottnest Island near Perth; police there suspected a large white shark. In January, 12-year-old Nico Antic died in hospital after a suspected bull shark attack off a Sydney beach during a spate of incidents that led officials to close dozens of city beaches. In November, a separate attack on the east coast killed one woman and seriously injured a man in a rare double attack at a national park beach.
Australia has recorded nearly 1,300 shark incidents since 1791, more than 260 of them fatal, according to long-running databases of human-shark encounters. Scientists say factors such as increasingly crowded coastal waters and rising ocean temperatures are altering shark movements and may be contributing to changes in the frequency and location of attacks.
Police and marine authorities continue to investigate the latest incident. Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.