Swiss fire latest: Families of missing teenagers plead for information as likely cause of deadly blaze identified

Scrutiny is intensifying over the safety arrangements at the Swiss bar that burst into flames during a New Year’s Eve party.

Beatrice Pilloud, chief prosecutor of Valais, the canton that is home to the bar in the upscale ski resort of Crans-Montana, said that available indications were that the fire started because sparklers got too near to the ceiling.

“From there, a rapid, very rapid and widespread blaze ensued,” she said on Friday afternoon.

Further investigations will show whether anyone faces criminal liability over the fire, Pilloud said.

One of the bar’s owners, Jacques Moretti, told the Tribune de Geneve newspaper that Le Constellation had been checked three times in 10 years and that everything was done according to the rules.

Reuters was not immediately able to contact the bar’s owners for comment.

Stephane Ganzer, head of security in Valais, said the investigation would determine if the bar had undergone its annual building inspections, but that the town had not raised concerns or reported defects to the canton.

The severity of the burns made it difficult to identify bodies, requiring families to supply authorities with DNA samples.

In some cases, wallets and any identification documents inside turned to ash in the flames.

Emanuele Galeppini, a promising teenage Italian golfer who competed internationally, was officially listed as missing.

His uncle Sebastiano Galeppini told Italian news agency ANSA that their family is awaiting the results of DNA tests, though the Italian Golf Federation on its website announced that he had died.

Clavier, a Parisian teenager, said he did not see the fire start, but he saw servers arrive with Champagne bottles topped with the burning sparklers in Le Constellation bar at the ski resort of Crans-Montana.

Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside 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 of the bar, they told the broadcaster.

One of the women described a crowd surge as people frantically tried to escape from the basement nightclub up a flight of stairs and through a narrow door.

Another witness speaking to BFMTV described people smashing windows to escape the blaze, some gravely injured, and panicked parents rushing to the scene in cars to see whether their children were trapped inside.

Valais regional government head Mathias Reynard told RTS radio on Friday that officials have been told “numerous accounts of heroic actions, one could say, of very strong solidarity in the moment”.

He lauded the work of emergency officials on the day after the fire but added that “in the first minutes it was citizens – and in large part young people – who saved lives with their courage”.

An impromptu memorial took shape near the bar, where mourners left candles and flowers. Hundreds of others prayed for the victims at the nearby Church of Montana-Station.

A French teenager on Friday brought a bouquet of tulips to the regional hospital in Sion for her best friend, a fellow 17-year-old girl who was badly burned and in intensive care.

The two attend school together in Lausanne, said the girl, who was in distress and did not give her full name to the AP.

But when she arrived at the hospital, her friend had been heavily sedated for a dressing change and could not see visitors. It was the latest in hours of heartbreak for the teen, who had intended to join a dozen schoolmates at the bar but ultimately decided against it.

She said she has since learned that two of the 12 are in a Zurich hospital. She did not know if the others survived.

On Instagram, an account filled up with photos of people who were unaccounted for, and friends and relatives begged for tips about their whereabouts.

Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old from Paris, had been ringing in the new year moments before he felt as if he was suffocating inside the Swiss Alpine bar.

The teenager escaped the inferno by forcing a window open with a table.

The dead included one of Clavier’s friends, and he told the Associated Press that two or three other friends were still missing hours after the disaster.

Arthur Brodard, 16, from the Swiss city of Lausanne, was among the missing.

His mother, Laetitia, was in Crans-Montana on Friday and frantic to find him. She held out “a glimmer of hope” that he might be one of the six injured people who had yet to be identified.

“I’m looking everywhere. The body of my son is somewhere,” she told reporters. “I want to know, where is my child, and be by his side, wherever that may be — be it in the intensive care unit or the morgue.”

The injured included 71 people from Switzerland, 14 from France and 11 from Italy, along with citizens of Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal and Poland, according to Frïdïric Gisler, police commander of the Valais region. The nationalities of 14 people were unclear.

Investigators said on Friday that they believe sparkling candles atop Champagne bottles ignited a fatal fire at a Swiss ski resort when they came too close to the ceiling of a bar crowded with New Year’s Eve revellers.

Authorities planned to look into whether sound-dampening material on the ceiling conformed with regulations and whether the candles, which give off a stream of upward-shooting sparks, were permitted for use in the bar.

Forty people were killed and another 119 injured in the blaze early on Thursday as it ripped through the busy Le Constellation bar at the ski resort of Crans-Montana, authorities said. It was one of the deadliest tragedies in Switzerland’s history.

Officials said they would also look at other safety measures on the premises, including fire extinguishers and escape routes.

A devastating fire that killed 40 people in a bar at a ski resort in Switzerland on New Year’s Day was likely caused by sparkler candles on champagne bottlers, officials have said.

Swiss authorities said that the fountain candles – also known as “flares” – were placed on champagne bottles and appear to have caught fire when moved too close to the ceiling.

The owner of Le Constellation bar told Swiss and Italian media on Friday that all renovations to the establishment had been carried out “in accordance with regulations”.

Jacques Moretti said the establishment had been inspected three times over the past 10 years, in an interview with Swiss newspaper Tribune de Geneve.

Authorities interviewed the French couple who bought the bar at the Crans-Montana resort in 2015, according to the Valais company registry.

Attorney general Beatrice Pilloud said they had not been interviewed under caution, but added: “If there is a flight risk, it is possible for us to take the measures needed.”