Swiss authorities face difficult task of identifying victims of deadly bar fire | Tourism news

Investigators are racing to identify victims and establish the cause of a devastating fire during a New Year’s Eve party that gutted a bar in the town of Crans-Montana in the Swiss Alps.

Relatives and friends struggled to find their loved ones, and many photos circulated on social media afterward. the disaster This occurred in the early hours of 2026, killing around 40 people and injuring around 115 others, many seriously.

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“We tried to contact them, some of their locations are still visible here,” a teenager present at the party, Valais, told AFP, pointing to the bar now protected by opaque white tarpaulins and behind a wall of temporary barriers.

“We took lots of photos [and] we put them on Instagram, Facebook, all possible social networks to try to find them,” says Eléonore, another.

“But there is nothing. No answer. We called the parents. Nothing. Even the parents don’t know,” she added.

Authorities have begun the arduous process of identifying victims, but with some bodies badly burned, police have warned the process could take days or even weeks.

“The first objective is to assign names to all the bodies,” declared Thursday evening the mayor of Crans-Montana, Nicolas Feraud, during a press conference. That, he said, could take days.

Mathias Reynard, head of government of the canton of Valais, said the experts were using dental and DNA samples for this task.

“All this work has to be done because the information is so terrible and so sensitive that nothing can be told to families unless we are 100 percent sure,” he said.

Bystanders described scenes of panic and chaos during the incident while people tried to break windows to escape, and others, covered with burns, poured into the street.

The exact number of people who were at the bar when it caught fire remains unclear, and police have not said how many are still missing.

The Constellation had a capacity of 300 people, plus another 40 people on its terrace, according to the Crans-Montana website. Crans-Montana is approximately 200 km south of the Swiss capital, Bern.

More than 30 victims were transported to hospitals with specialized burn units in Zurich and Lausanne, and six were taken to Geneva, according to Swiss media.

There is no official estimate of the missing or the staff at the Constellation bar that evening.

While Swiss authorities say around 40 people were killed, Italy estimates the death toll at 47, based on information provided by Swiss authorities.

Italy and France are among the countries that have declared some of their nationals missing and Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani will visit Crans-Montana on Friday, Italian Ambassador to Switzerland Gian Lorenzo Cornado said.

All but five of the 112 injured have now been identified, Cornado said. Six Italians are still missing and 13 hospitalized, he added. Three Italians were repatriated on Thursday and three more will follow on Friday, he said.

The French Foreign Ministry said nine French citizens were among the injured and eight others were missing.

“The Apocalypse”

Swiss President Guy Parmelin, who took office on Thursday, called the fire a “calamity of terrifying and unprecedented proportions” and announced that flags would be flown at half-mast for five days.

The fire broke out around 1:30 a.m. (00:30 GMT) on Thursday at Constellation, a bar popular with young tourists.

“We thought it was just a small fire, but when we arrived, it was war,” Mathys, originally from Chermignon-d’en-Bas, told AFP. “That’s the only word I can use to describe it: apocalypse.”

Authorities declined to speculate on the causes of the tragedy, saying only that it was not an attack.

The canton’s attorney general, Béatrice Pilloud, said investigators would check whether the bar met safety standards and had the required number of exits.

Multiple sources told AFP that the bar owners are of French nationality: a couple from Corsica who, according to a relative, are safe and sound, but have not been contactable since the tragedy.