CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland: Investigators said Friday that they believe sparkling candles atop Champagne bottles ignited a fatal fire at a Swiss ski resort when they came too close to the ceiling of a bar crowded with New Year’s Eve revelers.
Authorities planned to look into whether sound-dampening material on the ceiling conformed with regulations and whether the candles, which give off a stream of upward-shooting sparks, were permitted for use in the bar.
Forty people were killed and another 119 injured in the blaze early Thursday as it ripped through the busy Le Constellation bar at the ski resort of Crans-Montana, authorities said. It was one of the deadliest tragedies in Switzerland’s history.
Officials said they would also look at other safety measures on the premises, including fire extinguishers and escape routes. The attorney general for the Valais region warned of possible prosecutions if any criminal liability is found.
Arthur Brodard, 16, from the Swiss city of Lausanne, was among the missing. His mother, Laetitia, was in Crans-Montana on Friday and frantic to find him. She held out “a glimmer of hope” that he might be one of the six injured people who had yet to be identified.
“I’m looking everywhere. The body of my son is somewhere,” she told reporters. “I want to know, where is my child, and be by his side, wherever that may be — be it in the intensive care unit or the morgue.”
The injured included 71 people from Switzerland, 14 from France and 11 from Italy, along with citizens of Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal and Poland, according to Frédéric Gisler, police commander of the Valais region. The nationalities of 14 people were unclear.
An evening of celebration turns tragic
Among the crowd was Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old from Paris, who said he felt as if he was suffocating inside the Swiss Alpine bar where moments before he had been ringing in the new year.
The teenager escaped the inferno by forcing a window open with a table. The dead included one of Clavier’s friends, and he told The Associated Press that two or three other friends were still missing hours after the disaster.
An impromptu memorial took shape near the bar, where mourners left candles and flowers. Hundreds of others prayed for the victims at the nearby Church of Montana-Station.
A French teenager on Friday brought a bouquet of tulips to the regional hospital in Sion for her best friend, a fellow 17-year-old girl who was badly burned and in intensive care. The two attend school together in Lausanne, said the girl, who was in distress and did not give her full name to the AP.
But when she arrived at the hospital, her friend had been heavily sedated for a dressing change and could not see visitors. It was the latest in hours of heartbreak for the teen, who had intended to join a dozen schoolmates at the bar but ultimately decided against it.
She said she has since learned that two of the 12 are in a Zurich hospital. She did not know if the others survived.
On Instagram, an account filled up with photos of people who were unaccounted for, and friends and relatives begged for tips about their whereabouts.
Valais regional government head Mathias Reynard told RTS radio Friday that officials have “numerous accounts of heroic actions, one could say, of very strong solidarity in the moment.”
He lauded the work of emergency officials on the day after the fire but added “in the first minutes it was citizens — and in large part young people — who saved lives with their courage.”
Servers arrived with burning sparklers
Clavier, the Parisian teenager, said he did not see the fire start, but he saw servers arrive with Champagne bottles topped with the burning sparklers.
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 the basement nightclub up a 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.
Gianni Campolo, a Swiss 19-year-old who was in Crans-Montana on vacation, raced to the bar to help first responders after receiving a call from a friend who escaped the inferno. He described people on the ground suffering from terrible burns.
“I have seen horror, and I don’t know what else would be worse than this,” Campolo told French television network TF1.
Marc-Antoine Chavanon, 14, joined the effort to get people out of the tavern.
“People were collapsing. We were doing everything we could to save them,” he said. “There was one of our friends: She was struggling to get out. She was all burnt. You can’t imagine the pain I saw.”
The severity of the burns made it difficult to identify bodies, requiring families to supply authorities with DNA samples. In some cases, wallets and any identification documents inside turned to ash in the flames.
Emanuele Galeppini, a promising teenage Italian golfer who competed internationally, was officially listed as missing. His uncle Sebastiano Galeppini told Italian news agency ANSA that their family is awaiting the results of DNA tests, though the Italian Golf Federation on its website announced that he had died.
With high-altitude ski runs rising around 3,000 meters (nearly 9,850 feet) in the heart of the Valais region’s snowy peaks and pine forests, Crans-Montana is a major destination for international alpine skiing competitions. It’s also home to the European Masters each August.
Swiss investigators believe sparklers on champagne bottles ignited bar fire
https://arab.news/zru53
Swiss investigators believe sparklers on champagne bottles ignited bar fire
- Authorities are investigating whether the sparkling candles came too close to the ceiling of a bar crowded with New Year’s Eve revelers
- At least 40 people were killed and another 119 injured as the blaze ripped through Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana
What Bangladesh’s election means for India, China and Pakistan ties
- Bangladeshis will vote on Feb. 12, almost two years after the 2024 student-led uprising
- After nearly 2 years of tensions, experts expect a thaw with India under elected government
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares to hold its first elections since the 2024 ouster of Sheikh Hasina, its longest-serving prime minister, the outcome will define Dhaka’s relations with the most important regional powers — China, India, and Pakistan.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls on Feb. 12 to bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the current caretaker administration.
The interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, took control following a student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina and her Awami League party.
The two main parties out of the 51 competing for power are the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami. The Awami League, which for decades has had close ties with India, was excluded from the election ballot over its role in the deadly crackdown on the 2024 student-led protests, in which 1,400 people were killed.
While Bangladesh’s relationship India has deteriorated since the fall of Hasina, who has been in self-exile in New Delhi, the period of diplomatic strain is expected to ease when the new government takes office.
“Whoever comes to power in Bangladesh, due to domestic pressure in the country, relationships with India need a resetting,” Humayun Kabir, former ambassador to the US, told Arab News.
“It’s anticipated that India will also engage with the new government, but they will protect their interests, and we also have to do the same. It’s most likely that the India-Bangladesh relationship will be normalized under the new, elected, government.”
Since 2024, India has suspended key transshipment access that allowed Bangladeshi exports to go via Indian ports and airports. It also put on hold most normal visa services for Bangladeshis, who were among its largest groups of medical tourists.
From Hasina’s heavy pro-India orientation, the interim government has tried to rebalance Bangladesh’s foreign policy toward the two other key regional players — China and Pakistan — who at the same time are India’s main rivals.
If New Delhi regains its importance, it should not deal a blow to the newly expanded relations with Pakistan, with whom Bangladesh has recently increased exchanges, especially economic, and last month resumed direct flights — after a 14-year gap.
Since the relations have been expanded under the caretaker government, Prof. Delwar Hossain from the International Relations Department at Dhaka University forecast that they would only further improve, no matter who comes to power, and there is no likelihood of a sudden change.
“For Pakistan, any political coalition — whether BNP or Jamaat — will be positive. The BNP has a long history of having good relations with Pakistan during their rule ... Jamaat also has a strong and very positive influence in Pakistan,” he said.
“For Pakistan, the new regime or new government is not the issue. The issue is what the (India) policy of the new government would be and to what extent it would actually support Pakistan’s view.”
Both the BNP and Jamaat have repeatedly said they wanted friendly relations with India, and Hossain expected that they would, at the same time, continue the balanced approach introduced by the caretaker administration.
“India is a reality as a neighbor. At the same time, India is also showing interest in mending relations or adopting a more cooperative approach after the vote, with the government that will be elected ... I think there will be pragmatism from both sides,” he said.
“I don’t see there is a long-term threat to Bangladesh-India relations ... When China and Pakistan were trying to create a trilateral cooperative system or some kind of coalition — China, Bangladesh and Pakistan — we have seen that Bangladesh opted out. It seems that Bangladesh is going to continue its policy of maintaining a balance among these great powers.”
Bangladesh’s relations with China have not changed since the ouster of Hasina, whose government signed several economic agreements with Beijing. Yunus’s administration has continued this cooperation, and China was among the very few countries he officially visited during his term.
During the visit, he secured about $2.1 billion in Chinese investments, loans and grants, including funding for infrastructure like Mongla Port and a special economic zone in Chattogram — Bangladesh’s largest port. China has also eased visa rules for Bangladeshi businesspeople, medical travelers and tourists.
According to Munshi Faiz Ahmed, Bangladesh’s former ambassador to Beijing, China’s importance for Bangladesh cannot be substituted by any other country, especially as over the past few years it has emerged not only as its key investor, but also the largest trade partner.
In the fiscal year 2024-25, Bangladesh’s trade with China was over $21.3 billion, according to National Board of Revenue data. With India, it was about $11.5 billion.
The trade — especially import — dependence on Beijing started long before the regime change. In terms of trade volume, China overtook India already in 2018.
“Even when people thought that we had very close relations with India, our relations with China continued to grow in terms of trade and commerce ... Our trade with China has surpassed India’s, and China is a much bigger investor in Bangladesh’s development projects,” Ahmed said.
“Bangladesh will continue to cooperate with China for a long time to come because what China can provide, no other country can.”
