SYDNEY — A boy has been attacked by a shark in Sydney Harbor and is in a critical condition after suffering serious injuries to both legs Australian authorities said.

The boy, believed to be aged about 13, was pulled from the water near Shark beach at Neilsen Park, in the eastern suburb of Vaucluse, at about 4.20 pm Sunday afternoon.

“It was a horrendous scene at the time when police attended,” Superintendent Joseph McNulty, Commander of the New South Wales Police Marine Area Command, said at a press conference Monday.

“We believe it was something like a bull shark that attacked the lower limbs of that boy yesterday.”

He praised the boy’s friends who pulled him from the water onto a rock face, calling their actions “nothing but brave.”

It was “very confronting injuries for those boys to see, but I suppose that’s mateship,” he said.

Upon reaching the unconscious boy, emergency responders applied tourniquets to his legs to stop heavy bleeding before transferring him to a police boat.

Police officers performed CPR on the boy as they rushed to shore, where an ambulance was waiting.

The boy is now in critical condition at Sydney Children’s Hospital.

McNulty said the boy and his friends had been leaping off a popular six-meter (20 foot) rock into water turned brackish by heavy rain over the weekend. Brackish water is a mix of salt and fresh water which can attract sharks seeking food closer to the shoreline.

“We believe the combination of the brackish water, the fresh water, the actions of the splashing, may have made that perfect storm environment for that shark attack,” he said.

“He is in for the fight of his life now, and the actions of emergency services yesterday gave him that chance,” McNulty said.

Giles Buchanan, with NSW Ambulance, said by the time the boy reached them, “it was a resuscitation situation.”

“It was touch-and-go the entire time, and still he’s in a very dangerous position,” Buchanan said.

Less than 24 hours later, a shark took a bite from the board of an 11-year-old boy who was surfing further up the coast at Dee Why Point, the Northern Beaches Council confirmed. The boy was not injured, they said. — Agencies