Italian dentist fights off shark after witnessing diplomat's fatal mauling in Egypt

Peppino Fappani was sixty-nine years old and swimming at a five-star resort in Marsa Alam, Egypt, when the water around him turned violent. On December 29, he watched a man die.

The man was Gianluca Di Gioia, a forty-eight-year-old EU diplomat who had been snorkelling near the shore with his wife. Fappani was in the water holding a buoy when Di Gioia's wife began screaming from the dock. "I saw the wife, who was yelling and coming toward the dock," Fappani recalled later. "I didn't understand what was happening, but I was the closest one." He swam toward the commotion. Within moments, a shark struck. "I was about five metres from him, and then, 'Bam!' ...and the attack was devastating," he told The Telegraph. Di Gioia's injuries were catastrophic. He would not survive.

The shark then turned on Fappani. In that moment, he remembered something a guide had told him—advice about the animal's vulnerability. He drove his middle finger hard into the shark's left eye, three times in succession. The animal recoiled but kept coming. On the fourth lunge, staff from the dive centre arrived in a rubber dinghy and tried to haul him aboard. The shark clamped down on his right leg and would not release. "He grabbed onto my right leg and wouldn't let me be pulled up. That shark wanted to kill me," Fappani said. The diving staff struck the animal repeatedly with an iron bar until it finally let go.

Fappani was pulled from the water with severe lacerations across his right leg, hand, and arm. He required dozens of stitches. Di Gioia was also pulled from the water, but the injuries he had sustained were beyond recovery. He died.

Fappani believed the animal was a tiger shark, having seen it up close beneath him in the water. Egyptian authorities identified it as a mako shortfin—a discrepancy that speaks to the chaos of those moments and the difficulty of certainty in the aftermath. What is certain is that Fappani survived and Di Gioia did not. "My vacation was cut tragically short, but I survived. I am just very sorry for Gianluca Di Gioia, who didn't make it," Fappani said from his hometown of Soncino in northern Italy, where he was recovering.

The incident has triggered an Egyptian inquiry. Officials initially suggested that Di Gioia's group had strayed beyond the designated swimming area, but Fappani disputes this account. He insists they were within the safe zone and notes that there were no anti-shark nets in place to protect swimmers. The Red Sea has long drawn tourists seeking to dive among marine life, but the region has a history of fatal attacks. In June 2023, a twenty-three-year-old Russian tourist named Vladimir Popov was dragged into the water and mauled by a pregnant tiger shark estimated at ten feet long near Hurghada, north of Marsa Alam. His father watched from shore as his son screamed. The shark's violence was such that body parts were separated and had to be retrieved from the sea. Popov's father later met with Egyptian officials to arrange for his son's remains to be returned to Russia for burial.

Now, as Fappani heals from his wounds and Di Gioia's death reverberates through the diplomatic community, questions linger about what safety measures exist at these resorts, whether they are enforced, and whether the Red Sea's appeal as a diving destination can coexist with the genuine risk that lives in its waters.