Fire at the Constellation memorial in Crans-Montana: investigations and political tensions in Valais

The fire that broke out at around 6 a.m. this morning at the memorial dedicated to the victims of the fire at the Constellation nightclub in Crans-Montana, located in the Rue Centrale, is said to have started from candles. This was reported by the police of the canton of Valais, explaining that the fire brigade was able to quickly extinguish the flames, and that the intervention has been concluded. An investigation into the cause of the fire has been launched. According to the initial information gathered by the Valais cantonal police, the fire 'broke out from candles placed on a table in the centre of the memorial' in Crans Montana. At this stage, the authorities explain, the intervention of third parties can be excluded. Several memorial objects were damaged in the fire, but the book of condolences was saved. The flames created a large hole in the roof of the tent that protected hundreds of candles, flowers, letters and teddy bears from the weather. This was reported by the Swiss broadcaster Srf.

The memorial is an igloo in the Rue Centrale filled with flowers, messages, tealights and a few candles. One can sign on the large signature booklet one's solidarity to remember the 41 victims and 115 injured in the New Year's Eve fire. It is a place of pilgrimage that used to be in front of the Constellation and was then moved to the front of the church. A relocation carried out for 'safety' reasons that provoked numerous protests, with accusations of wanting to remove or remove from view what happened.

Meanwhile, the funeral of Alexis Bollag, the 41st victim of the fire that broke out on New Year's Eve at the Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, was held in Lutry on Saturday, 7 February. The young man died in the University Hospital of Zurich, a month after being admitted to hospital, from the consequences of injuries sustained in the New Year's Eve fire. Over a thousand people attended the funeral.

The investigation into the Constellation massacre is also likely to involve the Canton of Valais, in the aftermath of the shocking revelations by Christophe Balet, head of security of the Crans-Montana municipality, who admitted in his interrogation on 7 February that he did not have a fire prevention patent and explained that security checks in public places had been slowed down by a software update problem. On the work of the magistrates of the Prosecutor General's Office in Sion, the President of the Swiss Confederation, Guy Parmelin, who is in Milan for the Olympics, returned. Raising the institutional clash within the Confederation are the mayors of the Sierre district, of which Crans-Montana is part. In a joint document, they define as 'inapplicable' the very law that imposes annual fire prevention checks in all public premises. A rule that is not applied in the ski resort, considering that at the Constellation, where 41 people died and 115 were injured, inspectors had not gone since 2019. "No municipality is today able to fully assume this task; it is not just a lack of means, but a device whose perimeter is too wide," the first citizens write.

In calling for urgent legislative reform, they also threatened to resign: 'Both municipal security officers and political authorities could then be forced to abdicate their professional and political responsibilities. Laurent Moreillon, lawyer and professor of law at the University of Lausanne, also spoke on the possible involvement of the canton of Valais in the investigation. Interviewed by the Swiss television station Rts, he explained that 'if you get into the problem of analysing the responsibility of the municipality, you probably have to go higher up: it is possible that there is the official who omitted, but you have to ask who was supposed to control him, and then you get to the top of the municipality and probably even higher up, to the canton, which has a service that deals with fires. A lot also depends on what emerges in the interrogations next week.