Photo: The Canadian Press

Volunteers handle a coffin during a mass funeral for victims of heavy flooding and mudslides.

The president joined with families in paying final respects Thursday to victims of this week's mudslides and flooding in Sierra Leone's capital, while the government warned residents to evacuate a mountainside where a large crack opened.

Approximately 350 people had been confirmed killed and 600 more remained missing from the disaster early Monday. Workers struggled in the thick mud and debris of smashed homes looking for more bodies, picking their way through stools, shoes and other remnants of daily life.

The government hired 600 gravediggers for individual burials taking place in a cemetery that already holds victims of the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak which killed thousands in the West African nation.

"We all share the agony which has befallen the nation," President Ernest Bai Koroma told mourners at the cemetery.

"They had their hopes and aspirations, a bright future — like the six innocent children who went to study in the home of one of their brightest colleagues, like the young man who was due to get married tomorrow, like the husband who has worked so hard to get his family a new home and had just moved them to this new and lovely home," he said.