Goma (DR Congo) (AFP)

Four members of Ebola teams have been killed and five others wounded in two armed attacks in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where health officials fear that insecurity will make the epidemic go up again.

Both attacks took place on Wednesday night, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on Thursday.

An agent of the Congolese Ministry of Health and two drivers were killed in the assault on a "base" where Ebola response staff live in Biakato in Ituri province, WHO said in a statement. communicated.

The victim of the Ministry of Health was working for the "vaccination team".

A Congolese policeman, paid by health authorities to guard the Ebola facilities, was killed in another attack on an Ebola response coordination office in Mangina, the WHO said.

Mangina is a few dozen kilometers from Biakato, in the neighboring province of North Kivu.

The attacks have not been claimed. The Congolese authorities accuse "Mai Mai", militias formed on a community basis and whose actions range from the defense of community interests to serious crime.

"No WHO agent is among the dead, even if one of them was wounded," WHO said. "The other wounded are mainly agents of the (Congolese) Ministry of Health".

"WHO and its partners are treating the wounded and keeping other staff safe," according to the WHO twitter account in the DRC.

"Our Biakato and Mangina bases were attacked almost simultaneously around midnight," said the Congolese leader of the Ebola response, Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe.

Mangina is the place where the tenth Ebola outbreak on Congolese soil left in July-August 2018. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres went there on 1 September.

- "More people will die" -

WHO is the partner of the Congolese Ministry of Health in the fight against the Ebola epidemic, which has killed 2,199 people since August 2018.

"Ebola was behind, these attacks will revive the epidemic, and more people will die," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus, quoted in the statement.

Seven new cases of Ebola were recorded last week, against 120 at the peak of the epidemic last April, according to WHO.

30 km from Mangina, anti-Ebola activities are threatened by insecurity in Beni and its region, where a hundred civilians have been massacred since 5 November.

The killings attributed to the armed group ADF, originally a Ugandan rebel movement, established in eastern DRC where it has been rooted for nearly twenty-five years, have provoked angry demonstrations over the last week. blues present in the region.

The WHO said Tuesday that it has transferred from Beni to Goma 49 of its 120 employees fighting Ebola.

"Health control activities are disrupted in the cities of Beni and Butembo", because of demonstrations of the population denouncing "killings of civilians," noted the Congolese Ministry of Health in its latest epidemiological bulletin Thursday.

The current epidemic is the most serious in the history of the haemorrhagic fever virus discovered in 1976, after that which killed 11,000 people in West Africa in 2014.

She was elevated to the rank of "public health emergency of international concern" by WHO last July.

© 2019 AFP