About 40 people are believed to have been killed and 115 injured after a fire tore through a crowded bar during a New Year’s Eve party in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana.
Swiss police confirmed several dozen partygoers were dead. The victims could not be immediately identified because of the severity of their burns, the ministry said. It confirmed arson was not responsible, with the blaze thought to be the result of an accident.
A police spokesperson in the canton of Valais in south-west Switzerland said the fire started at about 1.30am local time (0030 GMT) in a bar called Le Constellation, which is popular with tourists, as revellers rang in the new year. “More than a hundred people were in the building and we are seeing many injured and many dead,” he said.
Video from the scene shows orange flames billowing from inside the ground-floor bar and lounge. Screams can be heard as well as loud music. Several people were seen collapsed outside the building, which is located in the centre of the Valais resort.
Two women told the French broadcaster BFMTV that they were inside Le Constellation when they saw a bartender carrying a female member of staff on his shoulders. She was holding a lit candle in a champagne bottle that set fire to a wooden ceiling. The flames quickly spread and collapsed the ceiling, they said. A photo showed a woman in a black dress in the basement of the bar, holding a magnum of champagne. A large white flame can be seen coming from the top of the bottle.
One of the women described a crowd surge as people frantically tried to escape from a basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door.
Another witness speaking to BFMTV described partygoers breaking windows to escape the fire, some gravely injured, and panicked parents rushing to the scene in cars to see whether their children were trapped inside. The young man said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames. He likened what he saw to a horror movie as he watched from across the street.
The morning after the tragedy, two women held each other and wept in front of the police cordon outside Le Constellation, while mourners left flowers. The club itself, which is frequented by younger people and tourists, was surrounded by police tents.
Shortly before 1pm a Swiss police forensics team entered the tents. Behind the building, an apartment block – also called Le Constellation – had smashed windows where firefighters had attempted to let the smoke from the blaze escape.
Crans-Montana is a bustling resort town of about 10,000 people perched high in the Valais canton of the Swiss Alps, with a view across the valley to the famed Matterhorn mountain. Unlike nearby Verbier, which attracts a wealthy anglophone crowd, Crans-Montana is popular mainly with wealthy Europeans.
But Le Constellation itself was more of a cheap and cheerful bar for younger people and tourists.
Ulysse Brozzo, 16, an instructor at the ESS ski school, said several of his friends were in the club at the time.
He said he had spoken to some who were safe, but had yet to hear from others he knew were inside when the fire broke out. A friend of a friend was in a coma at Sion hospital. “It’s a total tragedy,” he said. “There were hundreds of people inside.”
The venue was set over two floors, he said, with a bar on the main floor and narrow stairs leading to a basement nightclub below, where he speculated it would have been possible for people to have become trapped and incapacitated from smoke inhalation.
He said shisha pipes were available to smoke. “What people are saying is that the charcoal on the shisha could have spilled and caused the fire,” Brozzo said.
Speaking at a press conference on Thursday morning, Mathias Reynard, the president of the Valais canton, said what should have been a moment of celebration “turned into a nightmare”.
The police commander Frédéric Gisler said: “I can’t hide from you that we are all shaken by what happened overnight in Crans.”
Patients had been dispatched to hospitals in Sion, Lausanne, Geneva and Zurich, he said.
“At the moment we are considering this a fire and we are not considering the possibility of an attack,” the prosecutor Beatrice Pilloud said, adding that authorities had opened a full investigation.
She said authorities were trying to get the bodies of the victims to their families. “A lot of resources have been put into forensics to identify the victims. These resources are intended to allow us to get the bodies to the families as soon as possible,” she said.
Some of the victims are from other countries, said Stéphane Ganzer, the head of security for the Valais canton.
The 22 injured patients being treated at Lausanne university hospital are reported to be aged between 16 and 26. General manager Claire Charmet said eight of them were resuscitated on arrival. They were now being treated in critical and specialised care units. “This will be a long and intensive process, lasting several weeks, perhaps even months,” she said.
A reception centre and helpline have been set up for affected families, Lathion said. “We’re just at the beginning of our investigation, but this is a internationally renowned ski resort with lots of tourists.”
French media said Le Constellation was a well-known spot in Crans-Montana. It opened in 2015 and could accommodate up to 300 people inside, with another 40 on a heated terrace. The bar’s Facebook and Instagram pages appear to have been deleted and are unavailable. Its owners are reportedly a French couple, originally from Corsica.
The owner of the Dédé clothing store, directly across the street from Le Constellation, said the venue was a popular destination for younger people – including the children of her friends, who would often drink there from as young as 14 years old.
François, 17, a ski instructor who said he had often partied at the bar, said new year parties were known as being more lax in terms of checking the age of bar entrants.
The town relies heavily on a largely European clientele who come to ski, eat in several Michelin-starred restaurants and shop at Moncler and Louis Vuitton stores. It has about 3,000 hotel rooms and 10,000 residents.
With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
