18th September, 2014
Five people were missing Thursday after locals in Guinea attacked a delegation meant to educate them on Ebola, apparently because they feared the officials wanted to infect them with the deadly disease.
The five were seized on Tuesday when a delegation led by the regional governor came under assault in the town of Wome, in southeastern Guinea, local police told AFP.
The missing included two local health officials and three journalists, police and friends said.
Hospital sources in the city of N’Zerekore, 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Wome, said some of those missing had died but this could not be officially confirmed.
It was not immediately clear what prompted the violence, but the spread of Ebola has been accompanied by mistrust and paranoia.
Many Guineans believe local and foreign health care workers are part of a conspiracy which either deliberately introduced the outbreak, or invented it as a means of luring Africans to clinics to harvest their blood and organs.
At least 21 people were wounded during Tuesday’s protests, according to police.
“The villagers violently attacked the delegation led by the governor, Lancei Conde, with stones and sticks,” police lieutenant Richard Haba told AFP.
He said the protesters thought the outreach team had come “to kill them because they think Ebola is nothing more than an invention of white people to kill black people.”
A delegation led by the Health Minister Remy Lamah travelled Wednesday to the town, in the forested region of southern Guinea at the epicentre of the outbreak, to restore calm.
However, a security official speaking on condition of anonymity told AFP that villagers “put up barricades yesterday to prevent access to Wome. They cut down trees to stop traffic and even broke a bridge.”
The epidemic emerged in Guinea at the start of the year and has killed 600 Guineans out of a total death toll across four African nations of more than 2,600.
There has been other unrest.
At least 55 people were wounded last month in clashes between locals and security forces in Nzerekore which started, according to the protesters, when an Ebola disinfection team arrived to spray a market without the traders’ knowledge.
Guinea said on Tuesday it was delaying for two months celebrations for Independence Day, normally held in October, because of the outbreak.