After a devastating fire ripped through an upscale ski resort in Switzerland’s Crans-Montana area, the police are now struggling to identify the burned bodies of the victims as anxious family members issue pleas for news of their loved ones.
The burns suffered by a crowd of revellers at Le Constellation on New Year’s Eve are so severe, that it could take days before the victims are identified and named, said Swiss police.
Around 40 people were killed and at least 115 injured in the fire tragedy in the mountains of Switzerland on the intervening night of December 31, 2025, and January 1, 2026, officials said. While the cause of the blaze is being investigated, Swiss authorities have attributed it to have been caused by an accident, rather than an attack.
“The first objective is to assign names to all the bodies,” said Crans-Montana’s mayor, Nicolas Feraud, on Thursday evening.
As is the norm in cases where body identification is difficult, experts are using dental and DNA samples for the task, said Mathias Reynard, head of government of the canton of Valais.
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“All this work needs to be done because information is so terrible and sensitive that nothing can be told to the families unless we are 100 per cent sure,” he said.
The scene of the tragedy, which has been cordoned off, had bodies still laying in the bar, police said, as they worked around the clock to identify each of those who succumbed.
Survivor accounts and footage aired on social media suggests the ceiling of the bar to have caught fire from sparling candles that got too close, with the inferno then spreading rapidly.
“You think you’re safe here, but this can happen anywhere. They were people like us,” said Piermarco Pani, 18, a local resident who frequented the bar.
On Thursday night, hundreds of people stood in silence near the scene to pay their respects to the victims.
Crans-Montana is a popular tourist destination for both skiers and golfers and frequented by locals and travellers from around the world. Foreign embassies are now scrambling to discover if their nationals were among those who perished in the blaze.
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