This is the moment a waitress, carried on the shoulders of a colleague, held a sparkler in the air before a deadly blaze ripped through a Swiss ski bar, killing at least 47 people and injuring 115.
Separate footage filmed moments later shows a brave reveller trying to put out flames as they spread across the wooden ceiling of Le Constellation nightclub in south-west Switzerland.
Witnesses say a sparkler in a champagne bottle caused the inferno in the bar in the ski resort town of Crans-Montana, where around 200 partygoers had gathered to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
French outlet BFMTV said it had been sent the photograph of the waitress by survivors, who took the picture moments before the fire began.
Despite the efforts of the young hero to put out the flames, the blaze would soon engulf the crowded basement, travel up the narrow wooden stairs and set off explosions so deafening that residents feared a terror attack.
Survivors have since described harrowing scenes inside the club as people were burned, overcome by smoke, and struggled to escape amid a desperate stampede.
So severe were the burns suffered by the mostly young crowd – many in their teens and 20s – that Swiss officials said it could take days before they name all the victims of the fire.
Families now face an agonising wait to find out whether loved ones died in the early hours of Thursday.
Guy Parmelin, the Swiss president, described the inferno as ‘one of the worst tragedies that our country has experienced’ in that it ‘cut short many young lives’.
A photograph sent by survivors to French outlet BFMTV shows a waitress at Le Constellation sitting on the shoulders of a colleague while holding a sparkler in the air, moments before the deadly blaze ripped through the bar
Footage from the evening shows a brave reveller trying to put out the first flames as they spread across the wooden ceiling of the cramped basement bar in south-west Switzerland
Despite his efforts, the blaze would soon engulf the crowded basement, travel up the narrow wooden stairs and set off explosions so deafening that residents feared a terror attack
Following the fire, two women told BFMTV they had been inside the nightclub when they saw a barman carrying a female server on his shoulders.
She was holding a lit candle in a champagne bottle that set fire to the wooden ceiling, causing it to collapse, they said.
Victoria, one of the survivors, recounted what she saw moments before the fire: ‘It was firework candles inside a champagne bottle that caused the explosion. The entire ceiling of the bar caught fire.’
‘All the windows were black and opaque with smoke,’ she added. She believes many of the victims suffocated.
‘Some people smashed windows to let in air,’ she said. ‘I’m still shaking; many were crying as they left. It was mass panic.’
Another photo sent to BFMTV by survivors shows several partygoers carrying champagne bottles filled with sparklers, apparently moments before the blaze.
Adrien was also at Le Constellation when the fire began. ‘We saw people smashing windows, running and screaming,’ he said. ‘Parents were racing up in their cars. It was like a horror movie.’
A young Italian man said he is still anxiously waiting to hear from a friend who had been celebrating New Year’s Eve at the bar in Crans-Montana.
He told Italian public broadcaster Rai News one of his friends was ‘was burned all over’ while another was taken to Zurich by helicopter.
‘Another friend of ours…last night we had no news, he couldn’t be found,’ he said.
‘My friends and I, we haven’t slept last night, we’ve barely eaten.’
Dalia Gubbay, a woman from Milan who has visited Crans-Montana over Christmas for the past 30 years, told Corriere della Sera that her daughter-in-law ‘saw people burned, white sheets being placed over bodies’.
Another witness, Gianni, told Swiss outlet 20 Minuten that victims suffered severe burns, with faces ‘completely disfigured’ and hair burned away.
He said many were left blackened by the flames, with their clothes fused to their skin.
Tim Steffens, a 19-year-old ski instructor who witnessed the blaze, spoke to the same outlet about the scenes of panic as the fire broke out.
‘Everyone was pushing and shoving their way out of the stairwell,’ he said. ‘It was awful. They were all burned. Their clothes were burned away. It really wasn’t a pretty sight. The screams… not pretty, not pretty.’
Another woman told BFMTV of the difficulty in escaping the club, which had been rated just 6.5 out of 10 for safety.
‘The staircase leading out of the nightclub was extremely narrow,’ she said. ‘There was a huge surge in the crowd. We managed to escape just in time ‘
Another photo sent to BFMTV by survivors shows partygoers carrying champagne bottles filled with sparklers, apparently moments before the blaze
Security stands in front of the sealed off Le Constellation bar, where a devastating fire left dead and injured during the New Year’s celebrations in Crans-Montana, Swiss Alps, Switzerland, Friday morning, Jan. 2, 2026
A grab of a video obtained from the X account of @Tyroneking36852 shows a fire in a bar in Crans-Montana, a ski resort in the canton of Valais, Switzerland, early on January 1, 2026
A grab of a video obtained on December 2, 2025 from the Police Cantonale Valaisanne shows the interior of a bar after a fire, in Crans-Montana, a ski resort in the canton of Valais, Switzerland
Officials called the fire that raged through the crowded bar an ’embrasement généralisé’, a firefighting term describing how a blaze can trigger the release of combustible gases that can then ignite explosively and cause what English-speaking firefighters would call a flashover.
Parents of missing youths issued pleas for news of their loved ones as foreign embassies scrambled to work out if their nationals were among those caught up in one of the worst tragedies to befall modern Switzerland.
‘The first objective is to assign names to all the bodies,’ Crans-Montana’s mayor Nicolas Feraud told a press 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.
Italy and France are among the countries that have said some of their nationals are missing and Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani will visit Crans-Montana on Friday, Italy’s ambassador to Switzerland Gian Lorenzo Cornado said.
Australia has also said one of its nationals was injured.
Swiss officials have said around 40 people were killed but Italy has put the death toll at 47, based on information from Swiss authorities.
All bar five of the 112 injured had been identified now, Cornado said.
Six Italians are still missing and 13 hospitalised, he added.
Three Italians were repatriated on Thursday and three more will follow on Friday, he said.
Authorities have warned that naming the victims or establishing a definitive death toll would take time because many of the bodies were badly burned.
While what caused the blaze was unclear, Swiss authorities said it appeared to be an accident rather than an attack.
Residents of Crans-Montana, which has the distinction of being not only a popular draw for skiers, but also golfers, were stunned by the inferno.
Many knew victims and some said they were lucky not to have been there themselves.
Hundreds of people stood in silence near the scene as they came to pay their respects to the victims on Thursday night.
Switzerland has also ordered the national flag to be flown at half-mast for five days as a sign of mourning.
‘You think you’re 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 town, knew the bar well.
Dozens of people left flowers or lit candles on a makeshift altar at the top of the road leading to the bar which police had cordoned off. Some cried, others quietly hugged one another.
Behind the cordon, the bodies of some victims still lay in the bar, police said, as they pledged to work around the clock to identify everyone who succumbed to the blaze.
Kean Sarbach, 17, said he had spoken to four people who escaped from the bar, some with burns, and that they had told him the flames had spread very quickly.
Elisa Sousa, 17, said she was meant to be there but ended up spending the evening at a family gathering instead.
‘And honestly, I’ll need to thank my mother a hundred times for not letting me go,’ she said at the vigil for the victims. ‘Because God knows where I’d be now.’
Image from the scene shows emergency services scrambling to Le Constellation nightclub in the early hours of Thursday morning
Dramatic footage shows enormous flames rapidly spreading over the ceiling of the bar
A man comforts a woman as they stand near candles placed for the victims as a tribute outside the Le Constellation bar
The first victim of the deadly New Year’s Eve fire has been named as a 17-year-old Italian golf prodigy who was pictured with Rory McIlroy.
Emmanuele Galeppini’s death was confirmed in an Instagram post by the Italian Golf Federation, which remembered the teen as a ‘young athlete who embodied passion and authentic values’.
‘In this time of great sorrow, our thoughts go out to his family and all those who loved him’, the tribute added.
Galeppini had been out partying at the ‘Constellation’ bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, when a deadly inferno broke out around an hour after midnight on New Years Eve, leaving over 40 people dead and another 115 injured.
The teenager, from Genova, was among the 13 missing Italians on a list released by the country’s Foreign Ministry yesterday.
His father had gone out to ‘Constellation’ bar looking for him following reports of the fire, as his family launched an appeal to find find him.
Galeppini’s friends and family members suspected he had been out at the bar because they hadn’t heard from him since midnight, when his father reportedly spoke to him on the phone to wish him a happy birthday, according to reports.
As tributes poured in for Galeppini, desperate families were showing mobile phone photos of their young relatives in the resort of Crans-Montana to try and discover their fate in the basement bar fire.
A French mother called Laetitia in her 40s said she had been searching all night for her 16-year-old son Arthur.
‘I’ve been looking for him for over 30 hours,’ she told BFMTV, after trawling every hospital she could find in search of news in vain.
‘I don’t know which hospital he is in. I don’t know which morgue he is in. I don’t know which country he is in. I don’t know which canton he is in,’ she added, determined to find Arthur.
The first victim of deadly New Year’s Eve fire that tore through a bar at an Alpine ski resort has been named as 17-year-old Italian golfer Emmanuele Galeppini (pictured)
The teenage golfing prodigy had been pictured with golfer Rory McIlroy last year
A promotional video for the club shows waitresses passing around champagne bottles fitted with sparklers
Members of the police stand outside the “Le Constellation” bar, after a fire and explosion during a New Year’s Eve party where several people died and others were injured, according to Swiss police, in the upscale ski resort of Crans-Montana in southwestern Switzerland, January 2, 2026
A promotional video for Le Constellation shows waitresses passing around champagne bottles fitted with sparklers, and carrying buckets full of several bottles also with sparklers inside.
Images of the bar’s interior show what looks like soundproofing foam fitted on the ceiling – potentially flammable material that may have ignited in the blaze.
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 the number of people who were in the bar is ‘unknown,’ and its maximum capacity will be part of the investigation.
‘For the time being, we don’t have any suspects,’ she added, when asked if anyone had been arrested over the fire.
‘An investigation has been opened, not against anyone, but to better understand the circumstances of this dramatic fire.’
Axel Clavier felt like he was suffocating inside the Swiss Alpine bar where moments before he’d been ringing in the new year with friends and dozens of other revelers.
The 16-year-old from Paris escaped the inferno by forcing a window open with a table, but one of his friends was among the 47 other partygoers who died.
Clavier told The Associated Press that ‘two or three’ of his friends remained missing hours after the disaster.
Flowers and tributes are placed for the victims of the fire at the Le Constellation bar and lounge during New Year’s celebration, in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, Friday, Jan. 2, 2026
Crans-Montana is less than three miles from Sierre, where 28 people, including many children, were killed when a bus from Belgium crashed inside a Swiss tunnel in 2012.
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 one of the top venues on the World Cup circuit.
Swiss President Guy Parmelin, speaking on his first day in the largely ceremonial job, said many emergency staff had been ‘confronted by scenes of indescribable violence and distress’.
‘Switzerland is a strong country not because it is sheltered from drama, but because it knows how to face them with courage and a spirit of mutual help.’
One of the people still unaccounted for is an Italian, Giovanni Tamburi, whose mother Carla Masielli issued an appeal for any news about her son and asked the media to show his photo in hopes of identifying him, according to RAI.
‘We have called all the hospitals but they don’t give me any news. We don’t know if he’s among the dead. We don’t know if he’s among the missing,’ she wailed. ‘They don’t tell us anything!’
The injured were so numerous that the intensive care unit and operating theatre at the regional hospital quickly hit full capacity, said Reynard.
Dr Robert Larribau, head of the Emergency Médical Communication Centre at Geneva University Hospitals, said the victims they are treating there are suffering from severe, third degree burns.
He added that the patients are ‘very young… between 15 and 25 years old’.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, he said some are also suffering from ‘internal’ burns, after breathing in smoke.
The sheer number of casualties from the inferno has created difficulties for the local hospitals in Zurich and Lausanne, he said.
On Thursday, three of the wounded were being transported from Switzerland to a Milan hospital, the Italian civil protection agency said.
France’s foreign ministry said eight French people are missing and another nine are among the injured.
Top-flight French football team FC Metz said one of its trainee players, 19-year-old Tahirys Dos Santos, was badly burned and has been transferred by plane to Germany for treatment.
Speaking to Rai News, Anthony said he’d been queuing to get into the nightclub when he noticed smoke.
Describing how he originally thought it was a special effect, he said: ‘If I had arrived five minutes later, maybe I wouldn’t be here now.’
Jacques Moretti, 49, and his wife Jessica, 40, the owners of the Swiss nightclub, are now facing a raft of questions over how the deadly blaze spread so quickly in their basement venue and turned it into a deathtrap.
The couple, from the French island of Corsica, opened their bar called Le Constellation in the upmarket ski resort of Crans-Montana in December 2015 after falling in love with the area when they visited for a week’s holiday in 2011.
The bar with an upstairs terrace and a basement club, featuring DJs and live music, became one of the most popular nightspots in the town with a clientele of mainly young and affluent winter sports fans and locals.
According to the Crans-Montana website, the bar offered an ‘elegant space’ and a ‘festive atmosphere’ with online descriptions of it being the ‘place to be’ and popular with an international crowd.
It’s understood that it is also one of few bars in the ski resort that allows revellers who are 16 and over inside rather than having to be 18.
The basement venue was fitted with wooden furnishings and foam-style ceiling material and had only one narrow staircase for partygoers trying to escape.
