Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio said the majority of the leaders of an earlier Sunday attack on a military barracks in the capital, Freetown, had been arrested.
"We will ensure that those who are responsible are held accountable," Bio stated on national television.
"As your commander-in-chief, I want to assure everyone in Sierra Leone that we have overcome this challenge," he stated, restoring calm.
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Earlier, the government said security personnel had repulsed "renegade soldiers" who tried to break into a military armory in Freetown early Sunday.
A national curfew has been implemented. Assailants fired shots across the city as they stormed a prison and a police station.
It was unclear whether anyone was killed in the barracks attack or during the gunfire in Freetown on Sunday.
Ernest Bai Koroma, the country's former president, claimed in a statement that a military guard assigned to his apartment in the capital was shot at point-blank range while another was "whisked away to an unknown location."
Koroma did not specify who shot the security guard. He condemned the killing and the barracks attack.
"I am deeply concerned that, once again, our beloved nation could be subject to such insecurity," he said.
After the curfew was issued, the West African country's civil aviation body requested airlines to rearrange flights, while a soldier on the country's border with neighboring Guinea told Reuters that they had been ordered to close the border.
According to a journalist who observed an armed gang of men seize a police truck near the Wilberforce barracks earlier in the day, streets were virtually vacant on Sunday as inhabitants dug down.
Sierra Leone has been tense since Bio was re-elected in June, a result challenged by international allies like the United States and the European Union.
In August 2022, at least 21 citizens and six police officers were killed in anti-government rallies in Sierra Leone, which is still rebuilding from a civil war that lasted from 1991 to 2002 and killed over 50,000 people. According to Bio, the protests were an attempt to destabilize the administration.
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