CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland (AP) — 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 potentially one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies.
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.”
Beatrice Pilloud, Valais Canton 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.
Police officers and rescuers stand next to a firefighter’s vehicle on the site of a fire that ripped through the bar Le Constellation in Crans-Montana on January 1, 2026. (Photo by MAXIME SCHMID / AFP via Getty Images)
MAXIME SCHMID via Getty Images
An evening of celebration turns tragic
Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old from Paris who survived the blaze, described “total chaos” inside the bar. One of his friends died and “two or three were missing,” he told The Associated Press.
He said he hadn’t seen the fire start, but did see waitresses arrive with Champagne bottles with sparklers, he said.
Clavier said he felt like he was suffocating and initially hid behind a table, then ran upstairs and tried to use a table to break a Plexiglas window. It fell out of its casing, allowing him to escape.
He lost his jacket, shoes, phone and bank card while fleeing, but “I am still alive and it’s just stuff.”
“I’m still in shock,” he added.
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.
Officials described how the blaze likely triggered the release of combustible gases that ignited violently and caused what English-speaking firefighters call a flashover or backdraft.