"They grabbed me from behind and started punching me, hitting me with spades and machetes," says Daniel Uyirwoth Welo, one of four Red Cross volunteers injured when a crowd tried to open a coffin carrying someone who had died from Ebola.The assault was triggered by rumours - circulating locally and online - that the coffin was empty.
Some in the crowd said, "No Ebola doesn't exist," Welo told BBC Verify, adding that others believed the Red Cross team was there only "to get money".
This is, frankly, pure tribalism and ignorant beliefs about witchcraft that have plagued Africa for hundreds of years, and to call it 'misinformation' is to imply that they'd take any notice of actual information if they had it.
The attack is one of a series of incidents linked to misinformation during the latest Ebola outbreak, which has infected more than 1,700 people and killed 580 in DR Congo since mid-May, according to government data. False claims circulating in affected areas include allegations that Ebola doesn't exist, that health workers are deliberately infecting people or harvesting their organs, and that the Ebola response is a money-making scheme.
Its in line with the belief that the body parts of albino children have value in muti and that sex with a virgin can cure AIDS - primitive ignorant beliefs that the people of this benighted continent are prone to. And unthinking violence, of course.
In late May, rioters set fire to equipment and two isolation tents at an Ebola treatment centre in Rwampara after relatives of a young man believed to have died from the virus were prevented from taking his body away for burial.
So why does the BBC seek to describe this as mere ‘misinformation’?
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