The Ebola crisis has taken a nightmarish turn in Liberia

(Image credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

last updated 8 January 2015

Some grisly scenes are emerging from Monrovia, Liberia, where authorities have quarantined a slum where people have been infected with the Ebola virus, all but trapping residents in an Ebola-plagued prison. They have started to fight back in an attempt to break the quarantine. Here's The New York Times:

On Wednesday morning, the residents of West Point awoke to learn that their entire area was under government quarantine. Soldiers and police in riot gear blocked roads in and out of the seaside neighborhood. Coast guard officers stopped residents from setting out aboard canoes from West Point, the neighborhood with the highest number of confirmed and suspected cases of Ebola in the capital.

As residents realized that the entire area had been sealed off from the rest of the capital, frustrations began to mount. In one midmorning attempt to break through the cordon, at an entrance to the neighborhood next to an electrical station, soldiers fired in the air to dispel the protesters. But some of the bullets appear to have hit the crowd as well, intensifying the sense of a neighborhood under siege. [The New York Times]

Liberia has lost 576 people to the virus. All told, 1,350 victims have died from Ebola across West Africa since the crisis began.