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Guinean president, Alpha
Condé. Photograph: Johanna Pyneeandee/AFP/Getty Images
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Guinea has put 58 people
on trial over an attack on Ebola outreach workers by a mob wielding machetes, a
judicial source said on Friday. The defendants are accused of wounding several
government workers and staff from the global medical aid agency Médecins Sans
Frontières (MSF) with the knives as well as assaulting them with sticks and
stones.
"The 58 people were
referred to court for assault and battery, destruction of public buildings,
public insults and threats, and rebellion," the source said.
The group, who have been
on trial since Monday in the western town of Forecariah, were arrested after
the attack in early January on the nearby island of Kaback.
A judicial source in
Forecariah told AFP they face six months each in jail if convicted, with
verdicts expected next week.
Guinea and its neighbours
Sierra Leone and Liberia have registered more than 9,000 deaths since the
epidemic flared up in December 2013, according to figures released Friday by
the World Health Organization.
Mobs have sporadically
attacked healthworkers in all three countries after being taken in by a variety
of conspiracy theories, often characterizing the outbreak as a plot by the West
to murder Africans and harvest their organs.
Guinea has seen the worst
of the bloodshed and the situation is particularly tense in the West African
nation's densely-forested southern region, where the epidemic began.
A police officer and his
driver were killed and their bodies burned in the Forecariah region on January
10 by villagers who accused them of spreading the virus.
In September last year,
eight members of an outreach team were killed by protesters denying the reality
of the virus and denouncing a "white conspiracy" in the southeastern
town of Womey.
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