A tourist has been savagely attacked by a shark off a Caribbean beach, with reports that the victim lost both her hands as her husband tried to fight the beast off.

The woman, believed to be a Canadian national, had been enjoying a holiday to the Turks and Caicos islands when the bloody attack happened last Friday.

She was just a few yards from the shore when the predator struck, according to local media.

The 55-year-old had been wading in the shallows as she ‘attempted to engage’ with the animal and take a picture of it, local authorities said.

Witnesses said the woman’s family were nearby at the time and that her husband had bravely tried to stop the shark from biting her again.

Harrowing pictures show how a crowd gathered around the injured woman after she made it back to the beach, with cloths being held onto her arms as they apparently tried to stem the bleeding.

The shark was estimated to be around 6ft in length, the local government said, adding that the species is not yet known. Unconfirmed reports online have suggested it was a bull shark.

Meanwhile eerie footage taken by a tourist at a beachside villa show a shark thrashing about in the shallow waters nearby.

‘I was there for 40 minutes and it was still lingering,’ one witness told a local news site following the bloody attack.

A man claiming to be a relative of the woman said she was able to walk back to shore after being bitten. She was bitten in the thigh, he added, but did not lose her leg.

At the same time her husband desperately tried to fight off the shark, witnesses said, as it continued to circle and tried to bite the woman again.

Police and environmental officials confirmed the attack which occurred in the waters off Thompson’s Cove Beach in central Providenciales at around 10.30 am on Friday, February 7.

They advised the public to remain out of the ocean until the all-clear was issued.

Royal Turks and Caicos Police said that medical personnel and cops were dispatched to the scene near the neighbourhood of Blue Hills, Providenciales.

They added that the victim was brought ashore and rushed to the Cheshire Hall Medical Centre for treatment.

The woman reportedly had one of her hands amputated at the wrist and the other mid-way down her forearm, and is now said to be receiving medical care back in Canada.

Shark bites in the waters off the Turks and Caicos islands are relatively rare, with only one unprovoked attack reported last year which was non-fatal, according to Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File (ISAF).

In 2023 an American woman had her foot bitten off by a shark while snorkeling off the archipelago.

The 22-year-old, from Connecticut, was celebrating her graduation from Yale University with her friend on the island when the horror attack happened, a local source told Dailymail.com.

Tragically, her foot could not be reattached because an emergency aircraft took six hours to arrive.

The habitat around the islands is home to multiple types of sharks, including grey reef sharks, nurse sharks, tiger sharks, bull sharks, and hammerhead sharks.

The ISAF said in a statement this week that ‘2024 was an exceptionally calm year for shark bites. Worldwide, there were only 47 unprovoked attacks, down 22 from the previous year and well below the 10-year average of 70.’

Turks and Caicos was a British colonial possession and at various times was governed as part of Jamaica or the Bahamas.

It has had its own government since 1976 and was officially labelled a British Overseas Territory in 2002.