A team burying Ebola victims was attacked in Sierra Leone’s capital , a member of Parliament said yesterday, as a small group defied a three-day lockdown aimed at halting the worst outbreak of the disease on record.

In one of the most extreme measures since the epidemic began, Sierra Leone has ordered its population of six million to stay indoors as volunteers circulate to educate residents about the disease as well as isolate the sick and remove the dead.

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.

The attack on the burial team 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 police Local Unit Commander in the area, Superintendent Mustapha Kamara said he sent reinforcement to the village “after some youths attempted to disrupt the burial”.

He told Reuters that he has now instructed that the burial team must inform them to provide a stronger presence.

Ebola has infected at least 5,357 people in West Africa this year, mainly in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, killing 2,630 of those, according to the World Health Organization. More than 562 people have died in Sierra Leone.

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.

But volunteers said they were bombarded with calls on an Ebola hotline over the last two days, receiving hundreds of requests for help.

Stephen Gaojia, head of an emergency services operation, said the ability of his teams to respond to the calls waslimited 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”.

The leader of the United Democratic Movement party, Mohamed Bangura, said that his team buried 11 Ebola victims on Saturday.

The outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever is the worst since it was identified in 1976 in the forests of central Africa.