VIDEO: Around 40 people are dead and around 115 others were severely injured after a fire broke out during a New Year’s Eve celebration at a bar in a Swiss Alps resort, authorities said Thursday.
Calling it an “unprecedented tragedy,” Valais canton police commander Frédéric Gisler said many of the injured are in critical condition.
“The priority will be to identify those who lost their lives,” Gisler said at a news conference. Swiss President Guy Parmelin said that many of the victims were young people and the victims include Swiss residents as well as tourists from neighboring countries and elsewhere.
“Behind these numbers are faces, names, families, destinies brutally interrupted,” Parmelin said at the press conference.
The new year was less than two hours old when the fire that devoured the Le Constellation in the town of Crans-Montana was first reported around 1:30 a.m. (7:30 p.m. ET Wednesday), Gisler said.
NBC News
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