Twenty-six migrants, who had sailed from Guinea, died off the coast of Senegal when their boat sank a few days ago, Prime Minister Amadou Uri Bach announced today, speaking of a migrant “hemorrhage” in his country.

“So far we officially have 26 dead,” Guinea’s prime minister told reporters.

Most came from Matam, one of the communities that make up the city of Conakry.

In the previous days, the wreck had been reported on social networking sites, but the authorities did not specify how many victims there were. Relatives of the missing who spoke this week to an AFP correspondent said the migrants left at the end of April and the tragedy occurred in the first days of May.

Amadou Uri Bach recalled that thousands of young people from Guinea are currently in various countries awaiting repatriation after they tried to emigrate. “We have today about 3,000 young people waiting to be repatriated from Niger, 1,200 are in Algeria, 400 in Egypt, thousands in Italy and I’m not counting those in the US, because we don’t know their numbers. It’s bleeding for our country,” he underlined, referring to the various routes taken by immigrants.

The young people from Matam seem to have wanted to reach Europe by following the west coast of Africa.