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No fire safety inspection had been carried out for several years at the bar where a fire broke out during a New Year’s party, killing 40 people and injuring more than 100, local authorities announced on Tuesday.
Investigators said they believed flickering candles atop champagne bottles sparked the fire at the Constellation in the resort of Crans-Montana after they got too close to the ceiling. The authorities check whether the soundproofing material on the ceiling complies with regulations and whether the use of candles is permitted in the bar.
Swiss authorities have opened a criminal investigation against the bar’s managers. The two men are suspected of involuntary manslaughter, involuntary assault and battery and involuntary arson, according to the Valais public prosecutor.
Regional authorities said safety inspections were the responsibility of the municipality. On Tuesday, the president of the municipality of Crans-Montana, Nicolas Féraud, said that inspections had taken place at Constellation until 2019.
But he told a news conference that the municipality discovered, when consulting documents after the fire, that “periodic checks had not been carried out between 2020 and 2025.”
“We bitterly regret it,” he said, adding that it will be up to the judicial authorities to determine what influence this may have had on the chain of events leading to the fire.
WATCH | Several adolescents and young adults among the victims:
Police have identified all 40 victims who died in a bar fire on New Year’s Eve in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, including several teenagers. Two managers of the Constellation bar were indicted for criminal negligence, according to the prosecution.
Féraud said he could not immediately explain why safety inspections had not been carried out for so long.
He said that in September last year an external expert was commissioned to carry out a soundproofing analysis and concluded that the bar complied with noise regulations, without making any further comments.
The severity of the burns made it difficult to identify some victims of the fire that broke out around 1:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day, forcing families to provide authorities with DNA samples.
Investigators completed identification of the 40 dead on Sunday and said Monday they had identified all 116 injured people.
Féraud specifies that the inspection reports carried out show a maximum capacity of 100 people on the ground floor of the bar and 100 people in the basement. It’s unclear how many people were at Constellation when the fire broke out and investigators said it may never be known.
