Investigators are rushing to identify the victims and establish the cause of a devastating fire at a New Year’s Eve party that ripped through a bar in the Swiss Alps town of Crans-Montana.
Relatives and friends have been scrambling to find their loved ones, with many circulating photos on social media after the disaster that happened in the early hours of 2026, killing about 40 people and injuring about 115 others, many seriously.
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“We tried to reach them; some of their locations are still showing here,” Valais, a teenager who was attending the party, told the AFP news agency, nodding at the bar now shielded by opaque white tarpaulins and behind a wall of temporary barriers.
“We took loads of photos [and] we put them on Instagram, Facebook, every social network possible to try to find them,” Eleonore, another one, said.
“But there’s nothing. No response. We called the parents. Nothing. Even the parents don’t know,” she added.
Officials have started the arduous process of identifying the victims, but with some of the bodies badly burned, police warned the process could take days or even weeks.
“The first objective is to assign names to all the bodies,” Crans-Montana’s mayor Nicolas Feraud told a news conference on Thursday evening. This, he said, could take days.
Mathias Reynard, head of government of the canton of Valais, said experts were using dental and DNA samples for the task.
“All this work needs to be done because the information is so terrible and sensitive that nothing can be told to the families unless we are 100 percent sure,” he said.
Bystanders described scenes of panic and chaos during the incident as people tried to break the windows to escape, and others, covered in burns, poured into the street.
The exact number of people who were at the bar when it went up in flames remains unclear, and police have not specified how many are still missing.
Le Constellation had a capacity of 300 people, plus another 40 people on its terrace, according to the Crans-Montana website. Crans-Montana is about 200km south of the Swiss capital, Bern.
More than 30 victims were taken to hospitals with specialised burns units in Zurich and Lausanne, and six were taken to Geneva, according to the Swiss media.
There is no official estimate of the missing or headcount from Le Constellation bar that night.
While Swiss officials have said about 40 people were killed, Italy has put the death toll at 47, based on information from Swiss authorities.
Italy and France are among the countries that have said some of their nationals are missing and Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani will visit Crans-Montana on Friday, Italy’s ambassador to Switzerland Gian Lorenzo Cornado said.
All bar five of the 112 injured had been identified now, Cornado said. Six Italians are still missing and 13 hospitalised, 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 figured among the injured, and eight others remained unaccounted for.
‘The apocalypse’
Swiss President Guy Parmelin, who took over on Thursday, called the fire “a calamity of unprecedented, terrifying proportions”, and announced that flags would be flown at half-staff for five days.
The fire broke out at about 1:30am (00:30 GMT) on Thursday at Le Constellation, a bar popular with young tourists.
“We thought it was just a small fire – but when we got there, it was war,” Mathys, from neighbouring Chermignon-d’en-Bas, told AFP. “That is the only word I can use to describe it: the apocalypse.”
Authorities have declined to speculate on what caused the tragedy, saying only that it was not an attack.
The canton’s chief prosecutor, Beatrice Pilloud, said investigators would look into whether the bar met safety standards and had the required number of exits.
Multiple sources told AFP that the bar owners are French nationals: a couple originally from Corsica who, according to a relative, are safe, but have been unreachable since the tragedy.
