Investigators are rushing to identify the victims and establish the cause of a devastating fire at a New Year’s Eve party that ripped through a bar in the Swiss Alps town of Crans-Montana.
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.
“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.
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