Swiss face painful task of identifying victims of deadly bar fire

Investigators on Friday set about the painful task of identifying the burned bodies of a blaze that engulfed a crowded bar and killed around 40 people at a New Year's Eve party in the upscale Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana.



So severe were the burns suffered by the mostly young crowd of revellers in the Le Constellation bar that Swiss officials said it could take days before they name all the victims of the fire that also injured well over 100 people, many of them seriously.



Parents of missing youths issued pleas for news of their loved ones as foreign embassies scrambled to work out if their nationals were among those caught up in one of the worst tragedies to befall modern Switzerland.



"The first objective is to assign names to all the bodies," Crans-Montana's mayor Nicolas Feraud told a press conference on Thursday evening. This, he said, could take days.



Mathias Reynard, head of government of the canton of Valais, said experts were using dental and DNA samples for the task. "All this work needs to be done because the information is so terrible and sensitive that nothing can be told to the families unless we are 100 percent sure," he said.