Among the towns affected was Semabu, the seat of agriculture in the desperately poor west African nation struggling to emerge from a decade of civil war.

More than 20 people, three of them pregnant women, were seriously injured by corrugated iron sheets flying in the wind, witnesses who returned to the capital said.

"We have lost all that we acquired following our resettlement after the civil war," The Salone Times daily quoted flood victim Rebecca Stevens as saying.

An estimated 200,000 people were killed in the conflict that raged in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2001.

TERRA.WIRE