SWISS OFFICIALS FACE PAINFUL TASK OF IDENTIFYING VICTIMS OF DEADLY BAR FIRE

Sat 03 January 2026:

Valais cantonal police said Saturday it has identified the first four victims who died in a bar fire that broke out on New Year’s night at a bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland.

In a statement, police said that “in connection with the fire that occurred on New Year’s Eve at the bar ‘Le Constellation’ in Crans-Montana, the Valais cantonal police have identified four victims and return their bodies to their families.”

Authorities said the “extensive” identification process involved multiple institutions and was carried out over the past hours, identifying “two Swiss women aged 21 and 16 and two Swiss men aged 18 and 16.”

Following the completion of these procedures, police confirmed that “the bodies of the deceased victims were handed over to their families.”

The statement added that investigations and identification procedures concerning other victims are ongoing, noting that any new information will be communicated “as soon as possible.”

Police said no additional details will be released for now out of respect for the relatives.

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.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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