{"id":351470,"date":"2026-01-04T10:08:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T10:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/351470\/"},"modified":"2026-01-04T10:08:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T10:08:07","slug":"crans-montana-police-identify-16-more-victims-of-swiss-bar-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/351470\/","title":{"rendered":"Crans-Montana: Police identify 16 more victims of Swiss bar fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Police said no further details will be released about the victims they had identified out of respect for their relatives.<\/p>\n

Sparklers on bottles being carried too close to the ceiling<\/a> is the likely cause of the fire during New Year’s celebrations at the bar, a preliminary investigation found. <\/p>\n

The devastating fire killed at least 40 people and injured 119 others. <\/p>\n

Many of the dead and missing are teenagers. Le Constellation was a venue known to be popular with a younger crowd in the ski resort town, where the drinking age is 16.<\/p>\n

The eight identified and returned to their families on Saturday were all aged between 16 and 24, Swiss authorities said.<\/p>\n

On Saturday, the Italian ambassador to to Switzerland, Gian Lorenzo Cornado, said the identification process was slow because of the severity of the burns many victims had suffered.<\/p>\n

The French couple who own the bar – named by the media as Jacques and Jessica Moretti – are suspected of manslaughter by negligence, bodily harm by negligence and arson by negligence<\/a>, the prosecutors’ office for the Valais region said.<\/p>\n

Beatrice Pilloud, Valais canton lead prosecutor, said in a statement that investigators were looking into whether the acoustic foam on the venue’s ceiling was “the cause of the problem”, as well as “whether it complies with regulations”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Police said no further details will be released about the victims they had identified out of respect for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351471,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-351470","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}