Around 40 people have been killed and 115 seriously injured after a fire ripped through a bar on New Year’s Eve in a popular Swiss ski resort.
The blaze broke out at the Le Constellation bar in the Alpine resort of Crans-Montana, in what has been described as one of Switzerland’s “worst tragedies”.
Crowds of “mostly young people” had gathered to celebrate the new year when the bar was engulfed in flames at around 1.30am on Thursday, police said.
A man at the scene said people smashed windows to escape the fire, some gravely injured. He said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames, likening what happened to a “horror movie”.
The cause of the fire has still not been confirmed, but officials have ruled out an attack.
A video from inside the bar shows the beginning of the fire, with the ceiling ablaze.
At a press conference on Thursday evening, Attorney General Beatrice Pilloud was asked to respond to rumours that bottles of champagne carrying flares might have been the cause of the blaze, but said she could not confirm anything while the investigation is ongoing.
State councillor Stéphane Ganzer said the fire produced a “conflagration” – a large fire that causes a lot of damage, rather than it being an explosion.
Those in the bar frantically tried to escape from the basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door, causing a crowd surge, eyewitnesses said.
Attorney General Beatrice Pilloud was questioned on whether the staircases were “very narrow” during Thursday’s press conference, and said investigations will assess whether they were in line with requirements.
A total of 42 ambulances, 13 helicopters and three “disaster trucks” rushed to the scene as witnesses described injured being treated in improvised triage centres set up in a nearby bar and in a branch of UBS bank.
Samuel Rapp, 21, was dining at a Mexican restaurant when he heard of the blaze, and rushed with his girlfriend to Le Constellation.
“Police and paramedics … had already set up a protective perimeter,” he said. “There were people screaming, and then people lying on the ground, probably dead. They had jackets over their faces.”
Many of the people injured were taken to hospitals across Switzerland. Sixty people are receiving care at Sion hospital, with a “significant number” in a critical condition, while the director of Lausanne University Hospital confirmed they are treating 22 people so far.
