A harrowing picture has emerged appearing to show the precise moment a deadly fire was set off during a New Year’s Eve party in a ski resort bar.
The image shows flames starting to take hold in the ceiling of the basement bar as sparklers are held aloft in champagne bottles.
Officials believe the blaze started very quickly and video footage from the night has been analysed, while several people, including bar managers, have been interviewed.
Forty people have died and more than 100 left badly wounded in the fire which ripped through at Le Constellation in the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana at 1.30am on New Year’s Day. Formal identification of the dead is continuing, officials say, and this remains their priority.
Police commander Frédéric Gisler confirmed this afternoon that 113 of the 119 people who were injured have been formally identified. The formal identification process of the six others is still taking place.
Of those injured, 71 are Swiss citizens, 14 are French, 11 are Italian, four are Serbian, one is Bosnian, one is Belgian, one person is from Luxembourg, one is Polish and one is Portuguese. Mr Gisler said 14 others have unknown nationalities and warned these figures may change.
Beatrice Pilloud, Valais attorney general, says the fire appears to have been started from sparklers put on bottles of champagne that were moved too close to the ceiling.
A photo emerged of a woman holding sparklers in a champagne bottle inside the bar, apparently taken shortly before the fire erupted. The woman can be seen sat on a man’s shoulders holding the bottles with sparklers aloft.
The first victim of the fire has been named as Emanuele Galeppini, a 17-year-old Italian golfer who was confirmed dead by the Italian Golfing Federation on Friday.
Earlier, 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 “birthday 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.
Video footage shows partygoers attempting to battle the fire as it spreads through the bar.
The harrowing footage shows a young person trying to put out the flames with a white shirt.
A 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.
Gianni Campolo, a Swiss 19-year-old who was in Crans-Montana on holiday, rushed to the bar to help first responders after receiving a call from a friend who escaped the inferno.
"As we get closer, we see almost dismembered persons lying on the floor, in cardiac arrest. People were also inside trapped, laying on the ground. We saw their clothes melting onto their skin," Campolo told TF1. "I have seen horror and I don't know what else would be worse than this."
Another male survivor told AFP news agency: "We were trapped, a lot of people were trapped. We couldn’t see because of the smoke. We didn’t know how we were going to get out.
"I was alone and didn’t know how I could do it, but I managed to break a window and get out through the window. Half of my clothes were gone, it was crazy.
"I was in the basement. Me and my friends were having fun, unfortunately some of our friends are no longer with us because of the fire. It was crazy. People were trapped. I had to put a table up to hide behind it, trapped by the blaze. But I got out. That’s the main thing."
One of the survivors, Nathan Huguenin, 19, said he is still in shock from the tragic fire and has not been able to sleep. He said: “I saw people completely burned. I saw people dying. Honestly, it was quite complicated and quite difficult to stomach.”
Swiss authorities are working to identify the bodies of the victims.
