A team burying Ebola victims was attacked in Sierra Leone's capital on Saturday, a member of parliament said, as a small group defied a three-day lockdown aimed at halting the worst outbreak of the disease on record.
Police were called on Saturday to help the team in the village of Matainkay, 20km east of the capital Freetown. A witness told state television that the burial team initially had to abandon five bodies and flee.
In one of the most extreme measures since the epidemic began, Sierra Leone has ordered its population of 6 million to stay indoors as volunteers circulate to educate residents about the disease as well as isolate the sick and remove the dead.
A local police commander told the Reuters news agency that "some youths attempted to disrupt the burial".
Residents have mostly complied with the measures announced by President Ernest Bai Koroma earlier this week. On the second day of the lockdown, the streets were mostly deserted, except for ambulances and police vehicles.
However critics say that the measures could cause people to go to extra lengths to conceal those infected.
The attack on the burial team on Saturday occurred in the village of Matainkay, some three miles from the Waterloo district of Freetown.
Claude Kamanda, MP for the Waterloo district, said that armed policemen accompanying the burial team quickly arrived, causing the attackers to flee.
The charity group Doctors Without Borders said it would be "extremely difficult for health workers to accurately identify cases through door-to-door screening".
The group said that Sierra Leone did not have enough beds even if suspected cases were identified during the curfew.
Neighbouring Liberia had put in place temporary community quarantine measures and curfews last month, but lifted them after street protests.
Some have criticised Sierra Leone's lockdown measures, warning of food shortages and saying it might cause people to go to extra lengths to conceal highly contagious bodies.
Stephen Gaojia, head of an emergency services operation, said the ability of his teams to respond to the calls was limited by shortages of staffing and equipment.
"We need about 14 burial teams, as we speak we have about nine", he said. "So if we have more number of people that will be able to improve our response time".
But volunteers said they were bombarded with calls on an Ebola hotline over the last two days, receiving hundreds of requests for help.
The outbreak of the haemorrhagic fever is the worst since it was identified in 1976 in the forests of central Africa. The first victim of the current epidemic is thought to have caught the disease from a fruit bat in the forests of Guinea last December.
Western nations, led by the United States, have pledged in recent days to ramp up their aid efforts, and the United Nations said it would begin deploying an advanced team of its special mission to a regional headquarters in Ghana by Monday.
Volunteers and health care workers are often viewed with suspicion by locals who blame them for infecting the communities they are meant to be healing, slowing the ability of authorities to contain the disease.
Friday Kiyee, head of a Monrovia Ebola burial team, said that earlier this week locals placed a roadblock to prevent the collection of the decomposing body of a 29-year-old victim.
"Sometime we go into a community people will tell us they need an autopsy, and at the final stages you will see them blocking road. We don't expect for our own brothers to behave this way," she said.
Bans on Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone hosting any international football because of fears of spreading Ebola were kept in place by the Confederation of African Football, its executive committee decided on Saturday.
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