“She was walking down the beach when the pack overcame her,” an eyewitness in the Sicilian town of Scicli told ANSA. “The dogs bit her everywhere. It was horrible.“
According to witnesses, up to 10 dogs attacked the 24-year-old, biting her face, head, arms and legs.
A group of officials who happened to be in the area, including the town mayor, stepped in to save the woman, who would have otherwise “surely been killed,” the witness said. Emergency workers flew the woman to a hospital in Catania, in the east of the island, where doctors told Italian reporters she remains in “life-threatening danger.”
The officials who helped the woman were present to patrol the beach because a nine-year-old boy was killed by a pack of 50 roving dogs there over the weekend.
Italian health authorities on Monday had already rounded up some 35 of the dogs who had escaped from a neglected kennel nearby.
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