Police: Around 40 Dead, 115 Injured in Swiss Bar Fire

About 40 people were killed and another 115 injured, most of them seriously, after a fire ripped through a bar's New Year celebration in a Swiss Alpine resort less than two hours after midnight Thursday, police said. Authorities did not immediately have an exact count of the deceased. The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue, and overnight, its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of one of the worst tragedies in Swiss history, the AP reports.

• Valais Canton police commander Frédéric Gisler said during a news conference that work is underway to identify the victims and inform their families, adding that the community is "devastated." Mathias Reynard, the president of the State Council of Valais Canton, said injured people were being treated in hospitals across Switzerland, reports CNN. He said a "significant number" of the 115 injured are in critical condition.

• Beatrice Pilloud, the canton's attorney general, said it was too early to determine the cause of the fire. Experts have not yet been able to go inside the wreckage. "At no moment is there a question of any kind of attack," Pilloud said. She said she was "not able to give a timeline" for results of the investigation but teams are working to get answers "as quickly as possible."
• 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, they told the broadcaster. One of the women described a crowd surge as people frantically tried to escape from a basement nightclub up a narrow 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. The young man said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames and likened what he saw to a horror movie as he watched from across the street.

• Asked if there were minors in the bar, councillor Stephane Ganzer said he wouldn't describe the victims as minors but added: "You can imagine on New Year's Eve that the population is quite young," the BBC reports. "We're talking about a young festive population."
• Swiss President Guy Parmelin said in a social media post that the government's "thoughts go to the victims, to the injured and their relatives, to whom it addresses its sincere condolences." He said the fire was "one of the worst tragedies" the country has experienced. Thursday was Parmelin's first day in office. Out of respect for the families of the victims, he delayed a traditional New Year's address to the nation meant to be broadcast Thursday afternoon.