Mourners lay flowers as Swiss investigators probe fatal fire at ski resort bar

Swiss investigators are probing what caused a fire in a bar at an Alpine ski resort that left around 40 people dead and another 115 injured during a new year celebration.

Most injuries, many of them serious, occurred when the blaze swept through the crowded bar less than two hours after midnight on Thursday in south-western Switzerland.

Mourners have left candles and flowers in an impromptu memorial near the Constellation bar at the ski resort of Crans-Montana. Hundreds of others prayed for the victims at the nearby Church of Montana-Station.

The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue. It is less than three miles from Sierre, Switzerland, where 28 people, including many children, were killed when a bus from Belgium crashed inside a Swiss tunnel in 2012.

The blaze broke out around 1.30am on Thursday. Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside the bar when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lit candle in a bottle. The flames spread, collapsing the wooden ceiling, they told the broadcaster.

People frantically tried to escape from the basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door, causing a crowd surge, one of the women said.

A young man at the scene said people smashed windows to escape the fire, some gravely injured, reported BFMTV. He said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames, likening what happened to a horror movie.

While officials said on Thursday it was too early to determine the fire’s cause, investigators have already ruled out the possibility of an attack.

Work is under way to identify the dead and inform their families, according to Valais Canton police commander Frederic Gisler.

The Swiss officials called the blaze an “embrasement generalise”, a French firefighting term describing how a blaze can trigger the release of combustible gases that can then ignite violently and cause what English-speaking firefighters would call a flashover or a backdraft.

The injured suffered from serious burns and smoke inhalation. Some were flown to specialist hospitals across the country.

Authorities urged people to show caution in the coming days to avoid any accidents that could require the already overwhelmed medical resources.

Thirteen of the wounded were Italian citizens, and another six Italians are unaccounted for, Italy’s ambassador to Switzerland, Gian Lorenzo Cornado, told state-run RAI television.

One of the people missing was Giovanni Tamburi, whose mother Carla Masielli issued an appeal for any news about her son and asked the media to show his photo in hopes of identifying him.

“We have called all the hospitals but they don’t give me any news. We don’t know if he’s among the dead. We don’t know if he’s among the missing,” she said.

Three of the wounded were being transported from Switzerland to a Milan hospital, the Italian civil protection agency said.

France’s foreign ministry said eight French people are missing and another nine are among the injured. Top-flight French football team FC Metz said one of its trainee players, 19-year-old Tahirys Dos Santos, was badly burned and has been transferred by plane to Germany for treatment.

Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old from Paris, escaped the inferno by forcing a window open with a table. He said it felt like he was suffocating inside the bar where moments before he had been ringing in the new year with friends and dozens of other revellers.

The teenager told the Associated Press that “two or three” of his friends remained missing hours after the disaster.

Swiss President Guy Parmelin, speaking on his first day in the largely ceremonial job, said many emergency staff had been “confronted by scenes of indescribable violence and distress”.

He said: “Switzerland is a strong country not because it is sheltered from drama, but because it knows how to face them with courage and a spirit of mutual help.”