‘An incomprehensible nightmare’: grief turns to anger over Swiss bar fire as Le Constellation owner arrested

Original article by Angela Giuffrida

Like many young people across Switzerland, Kenzo Ronnow, a university student in Lausanne, slept in on 1 January after celebrating the new year.

But as he scrolled through his phone soon after waking, he saw the lead story of a foreign news website was about Switzerland.

A fire had ripped through Le Constellation, a bar in Crans-Montana, an Alpine ski resort in Switzerland’s Valais canton and a customary haunt for New Year’s Eve revellers.

One of the two bar owners was on Friday taken into custody.

At first, the 19-year-old struggled to grasp what was happening. “They were talking about lots of people being dead,” he said. “I was really surprised, also because Switzerland isn’t often in the news.”

He was with his flatmate, who asked Ronnow to read the story aloud to her. “That’s when she said her little brother was in Crans-Montana for New Year’s Eve.”

A frantic call was made to her sibling, who had celebrated the new year in Le Constellation but left at about 1.15am, just 15 minutes before the fire broke out.

Similar scrambles for the whereabouts of family and friends played out across Switzerland as the horror of the tragedy, one of the worst in the country’s recent history, began to sink in.

Eight days have passed and the country is still struggling to process the scale of the event. A national day of mourning was observed on Friday and a memorial ceremony attended by top European officials, including the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his Italian counterpart, Sergio Mattarella, was held in a town close to Crans-Montana.

Swiss authorities have confirmed the total death toll at 40, the majority in their teens and 20s – the youngest 14 – and mostly from Switzerland, France and Italy. A further 116 were injured, 83 of whom are still being treated in hospital for severe burns.

Anger and dismay have meanwhile mounted as details on the cause of the fire and staggering lapses in safety procedures emerged.

Jacques and Jessica Moretti, the owners of the bar, are under investigation for manslaughter through negligence. Mr Moretti was arrested and held in custody after the couple were questioned by prosecutors in Sion on Friday morning, a source told the Guardian.

The couple, who bought the bar in 2015 before renovating it, have denied any wrongdoing and in a statement this week said they were “devastated and overwhelmed with grief” while promising “full cooperation” with the investigation.

Authorities said the fire started in the bar’s crammed basement room after sparklers attached to champagne bottles were held too close to a ceiling believed to have been clad with soundproofing foam. A haunting image shared on social media showed a female server sitting on the shoulders of a male colleague holding a bottle with sparklers in each hand before the flames caught the ceiling. The woman was among those who died.

The investigation is focusing on renovations made to the bar, the fire-extinguishing systems and escape routes, as well as the number of people in the building when the fire started.

In an astonishing admission on Tuesday, Nicolas Féraud, the mayor of Crans-Montana, said no safety inspections had been made on the premises since 2019. He could not explain why the annual inspections were not done despite the procedure being required by local law. “We’re profoundly sorry, and I know how hard that will be for the families,” Féraud said, adding that his administration wanted to show “full transparency”.

Lawyers representing the families of those who died or were injured in the tragedy have accused investigators of not moving quickly enough to secure crucial evidence.

As firefighters worked to extinguish the blaze, Romain Jordan and Ronald Asmar, lawyers with the Geneva-based firm Merkt, claimed that the bar’s owners appeared to have deactivated its Instagram and Facebook accounts, in the process “deleting pictures and videos that could have been useful to the investigation”. The Guardian has contacted the couple’s lawyers for comment.

“This attitude should have alerted the prosecutors immediately,” added Jordan, who alongside Asmar was present during the Morettis’ questioning on Friday. He claimed authorities initially tried to keep lawyers representing families out of the hearing. “The authorities are only now starting to take the full measure of the investigation.”

Jordan said that everyone, especially those living in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, had been “personally affected [by the tragedy] at some level or another”.

“The first tier of this tragedy is seeing young lives ending in this way, or being hurt and bearing scars for ever,” he said. “Then you quickly understand that it perhaps happened because of human mistakes … and the worst thing is that the authorities were perhaps complacent. So all of these layers add up to an incomprehensible nightmare, making it difficult to accept.”

He added: “The whole world is looking at us because, if it can happen in Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world, where could it not happen? What led to this tragedy and how can we make sure that that it never happens anywhere else?”

Authorities are already taking heed. As thousands of bars, restaurants and nightspots were checked in Crans-Montana and surrounding towns, new safety measures were announced in Vaud canton, where Lausanne is located.

As normal life resumes after the Christmas and New Year holiday, the tragedy is still dominating conversations. “It’s definitely on everyone’s minds, and with all the other stuff happening all of a sudden in the world, people are overwhelmed,” said Ronnow.

“But what has been super shocking for me and a lot of others is that, even though the attention has been on Le Constellation, it could easily have happened elsewhere. When I go to a nightclub it is really common to see bottles with sparklers. There’s now a big push to check safety regulations, but people are thinking: ‘It could have been me.’”