DRC Ebola hospital set on fire as protesters demand access to bodies of dead relatives

Violence has erupted in eastern DR Congo's Ituri province after tensions linked to the handling of victims of the latest Ebola outbreak.

Protesters in the town of Rwampara wanted to recover the bodies of relatives who died of Ebola in order to bury them. When they were denied, they set the hospital on fire, according to local reports.

Video footage shared by a healthcare worker appeared to show security forces intervening to retake control of the building.

The incident comes as a first Ebola case has been confirmed in the region's South Kivu province, under the control of M23 militia, the group's spokesperson said on Thursday.

Efforts to get a grip on the latest outbreak of the deadly haemorrhagic disease, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared an international emergency, have been hampered by the DRC's long-running conflicts, including that between the Congolese army and the M23.

Having seized swathes of land in the mineral-rich east with Rwanda's help, the M23 has set up to govern for the long run in areas under its control, installing a parallel administration to the Congolese government.

But the armed group has never had to manage the response to a serious epidemic of a disease like Ebola, which has killed more than 15,000 people in Africa in the past half-century.

According to the M23 spokesman, tests "confirm a new positive case" from the South Kivu provincial capital Bukavu, which fell into M23 hands in February 2025. But the case involved a "person coming from Kisangani", a major city in the eastern Tshopo province where no Ebola infections from the current outbreak have so far been recorded.

According to the WHO, 139 people have died in the latest outbreak. Nearly 600 probably cases have been identified.