When 51-year-old Annouk Perret came to pay her respects to the victims of the Swiss New Year bar fire that killed at least 40 people in the ski resort of Crans-Montana, she knew that she too could have been one of the parents mourning a lost child. Authorities say most of the victims of the blaze that ripped through the Le Constellation bar were young people in a country renowned for orderliness and unaccustomed to mass fatalities. Instead, she said her daughter went to a bar opposite with friends.
When flames engulfing the bar sparked a blast, they first assumed it was fireworks; when police quickly arrived, the group feared it was gunfire and fled, Perret said. Afterwards, the family learned that another friend of her daughter decided to enter “Le Constellation” just before the fire and lost her life there, Perret told Reuters. “We’ve come today because we need to be here.
We need to see the place where it happened,” she said. ”(She) could have been dead, but is not. But others are dead.” Perret spoke just as Swiss authorities were announcing they had identified four more victims aged 16-21, without naming them.
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Very few of the dead have so far been identified, with the severity of burns making identification hard. Prosecutors on Saturday said the two people who ran the bar are now under investigation suspected of crimes including homicide by negligence. Damiano Vizioli, a 24-year-old living in neighbouring Sion, was in Le Constellation on New Year’s Eve but had gone outside to smoke a cigarette when the bar suddenly burst into flames.
He was stunned to see people with their clothes on fire scrambling to escape from the burning bar, he said. The distressing scenes he witnessed have stayed with him. “I’m not sleeping well because I can hear the people screaming,” said Vizioli, who went back to the bar desperate for news of a friend working there whom he has not heard from since.
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