BAMAKO - A 25-year-old nurse who was Mali's second Ebola case has died, the government said in a statement on Wednesday.

The case involving the nurse at a private medical clinic in the capital, Bamako, is unrelated to Mali's first Ebola victim, a two-year-old girl from Guinea who died last month.

A group linked to the girl completed their 21-day quarantine on Tuesday but aid workers and the government now must track a new set of people who came in contact with the nurse and another man from Guinea who is believed to have infected the nurse when he travelled to and died in Mali with Ebola.

The government said that all necessary steps to identify people who had come into contact with the nurse, who died on Tuesday evening, had been taken.

It did not say how many people were being traced but said a private clinic and the nurse's home had been disinfected and sealed off.

The Pasteur Clinic, one of Bamako's best medical centres, was locked down by police on Tuesday night.

Mali, the sixth West African country to record a case of Ebola, shares an 800 km (500 mile) border with Guinea, which alongside Liberia and Sierra Leone, has been worst affected by an outbreak that has killed nearly 5,000 people this year.