Heavily pregnant when she died, Fatimah Jakemah was bagged, bleached and carted off for cremation, one of dozens of new cases in the capital that week as Ebola tightened its grip on Liberia.

It was early September and the outbreak was about to mushroom into an emergency of historic proportions that would eventually see 4,700 deaths throughout the country.

Four years after Alassane Ouattara took power in Ivory Coast amid post-election violence that left thousands dead, exiles who fought him tooth and nail yearn to return but fear bloody reprisals.

Hundreds of fighters once loyal to ousted ex-president Laurent Gbabgo have been refugees in Liberia since fleeing Abidjan and the far west, where long-simmering ethnic tensions exploded into massacres in 2011.

Estella Verdier keeps vigil by her sick four-month-old grandson's hospital bed, praying for his recovery but placing her faith in the earthly healing powers of Liberia's first ever children's hospital.

The 46-bed unit, just opened in Monrovia by Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), is part of the country's response to the challenge of repairing its wrecked health service as it emerges from the nightmare of Ebola.

The people of Monrovia's Peace Island ghetto, refugees of civil war who found themselves suddenly overwhelmed and outmanoeuvred by the deadly Ebola epidemic, are used to life under siege.

Yet with Liberia emerging from the worst outbreak in history a year to the day since Ebola was first identified in west Africa, the slum-dwellers are facing an even deadlier threat -- the measles virus. 

Liberia Friday confirmed its first new Ebola case in more than a month in a setback to hopes the country would soon be officially declared free of the deadly disease.

The country was the hardest hit at the peak of the epidemic in west Africa and has seen more than 4,000 deaths in all, but was at an advanced stage in its recovery and was expecting to be declared Ebola-free by mid-April before the latest case in the capital Monrovia.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on Friday praised President Barack Obama's "extraordinary" leadership in the fight against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

With Liberia now in recovery from the worst outbreak ever of the deadly virus, the United States ended its military mission in the region Thursday.

The first large-scale trials of two Ebola vaccines were due to begin in Liberia on Monday, the partnership conducting the research said.

The vaccines contain harmless fragments of the virus that trigger an immune response, according to the Partnership for Research on Ebola Vaccines in Liberia (PREVAIL), a collaboration between the United States and Liberia.

Liberia's president on Monday announced the closure of an Ebola treatment facility which lay at the epicentre of the virus's worst outbreak in history, as the disease's spread has slowed in the country.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf warned Liberians that while they could not yet afford to relax, the country had made significant progress in the fight against Ebola, and thanked states who helped Monrovia combat the virus.

Swiss authorities have arrested Alieu Kosiah, a top rebel commander in the first of Liberia's back-to-back civil wars, for presumed war crimes.

Kosiah, a former commander in the now defunct United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy group or ULIMO, is suspected of ordering civilian massacres between 1993 and 1995.

Liberia, the African nation at the center of world's deadliest Ebola outbreak, could see an end to the epidemic by June if 85 percent of sick people get hospital care, US researchers said Tuesday.

Cases have begun to decline in recent weeks, and schools are set to reopen next month after closing in July as the nation struggled with the fast-moving outbreak of hemorrhagic fever.