Dozens killed in fire at Swiss Alps resort

About 40 people were killed and 115 others injured, most of them seriously, after a fire ripped through a New Year's celebration in a Swiss Alpine resort bar less than two hours after midnight Thursday, police said.

- BY JAMEY KEATEN, STEFANIE DAZIO AND JOHN LEICESTER

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BOTT Keystone

SWISS police gather outside the site of the blaze.

Authorities did not immediately have an exact count of the dead.

The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue, and overnight, its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies. The country will observe five days of mourning.

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.”

Thirteen of the wounded were Italian citizens, and six more Italians remained unaccounted for, Italy’s ambassador to Switzerland, Gian Lorenzo Cornado, told state-run RAI television.

Beatrice Pilloud, Valais Canton’s attorney general, said it was too early to determine the cause of the fire. Experts have not yet been able to go inside the wreckage.

"At no moment is there a question of any kind of attack," Pilloud said. (Switzerland, from At]

She later said the number of people who were in the bar is “currently totally unknown,” adding that its maximum capacity will be part of the investigation.“For the time being, we don’t have any suspect,” she added, when asked whether anyone had been arrested in the fire. “An investigation has been opened, not against anyone, but to illuminate the circumstances of this dramatic fire.”