Live fire in Switzerland: First victim named as teenage golfer after 40 deaths in bar

The community is located in the heart of the Swiss Alps, just 40 kilometers north of the Matterhorn.

With high-altitude ski slopes at around 3,000 metres, Crans-Montana is one of the winter sports centers of the Swiss Valais region, attracting winter sports enthusiasts from all over the world.

The first victim of the bar fire in Crans-Montana is Emanuele Galeppini, a teenage golfer from Italy.

In a statement, the Italian Golf Federation said it mourned the death of “a young athlete who embodied passion and authentic values.”

“At this time of great sadness, our thoughts go out to his family and all who loved him,” they said.

At least nine French people were injured in the fire at the Swiss resort, and eight remained missing, the French Foreign Ministry said.

“The toll of the terrible fire in Crans-Montana on the night of January 1 is mounting,” the ministry told CNN.

“At this stage we cannot rule out the possibility that the victims of the fire include French nationals, whose identification is still ongoing.”

The ministry said the injured Frenchmen were “placed under surveillance”, with three of them transferred to French hospitals in Lyon and Paris.

About 40 people have been killed and about 100 injured, most seriously.

The commander of the Valais cantonal police, Frédéric Gisler, said at a press conference on Thursday that authorities expect several foreigners to be among the dead.

Sixteen Italians have been reported missing, while another dozen Italians are being treated in hospital, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Thursday.

Swiss President Guy Parmelin also confirmed that many of the victims were young people, with hospital directors confirming that patients as young as 16 were being treated.

Residents of Crans-Montana, which is a popular destination not only for skiers but also for golfers, mourned the victims of the fire at the ski resort.

About 40 people were killed and another 115 injured, most seriously, after a fire destroyed a bar’s New Year celebration at a Swiss Alpine resort less than two hours after midnight on Thursday.

Hundreds of people stood in silence at the crime scene as they came to pay their respects to the victims last night. ‘You think you are safe here, but this can happen anywhere. They were people like us,” said Piermarco Pani, an 18-year-old who, like many others in the city, knew the bar well.

Dozens of people left flowers or lit candles at a makeshift altar at the top of the road leading to the bar that police had cordoned off. Some cried, others quietly hugged each other.

Behind the cordon, the bodies of some victims were still in the bar, police said, as they vowed to work around the clock to identify anyone who succumbed to the fire.

Swiss investigators today began the painful task of identifying burned bodies from a fire that engulfed a crowded bar and killed about 40 people at a New Year’s Eve party in the luxury Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana.

The burns suffered by the mostly young crowd of partygoers at Le Constellation bar were so severe that Swiss officials said it could be days before they name all the victims of the fire, which also left 115 injured, many of them seriously.

Parents of missing young people anxiously begged for news of their loved ones, while foreign embassies rushed to find out whether their nationals were among those involved in one of the worst tragedies to befall modern Switzerland.

“The first goal is to give names to all the bodies,” Crans-Montana Mayor Nicolas Feraud told a news conference. According to him, this could take days.

Mathias Reynard, head of government of the canton of Valais, said experts used dental and DNA samples for this task. “All this work has 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.

Bystander footage captured the moment crowds fled when a fire broke out in a bar in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana.

Police have confirmed that “several dozen” are believed to have died after the fire ripped through popular tourist bar Le Constellation during New Year’s celebrations.

Israel has offered Switzerland help in identifying the victims after 40 people died in a fire that destroyed a bar in the popular Crans-Montana ski resort.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog told his Swiss counterpart Guy Parmelin that Israel was ready to help in any way possible.

He told the Swiss president that Israel has both “experience and advanced capabilities” that it has honed over the years, “in the field of locating and identifying fire victims, but also in the field of treating burn victims in fire-related incidents.”

One Israeli aid organization is already sending a team to the scene of the tragedy, the Times of Israel reported.

A 16-year-old from Paris who survived the fire described “total chaos” in the bar.

One of his friends died and “two or three were missing,” he told the Associated Press.

The teen said he did not see the fire start, but did see waitresses arrive with champagne bottles with sparklers.

He said he felt like he was suffocating and initially hid behind a table, then ran upstairs and tried to use a table to break an acrylic glass window. It fell out of the enclosure, allowing him to escape.

He lost his jacket, shoes, phone and bank card during the flight, but said: “I’m still alive and it’s just stuff.”

“I’m still in shock,” he added.