CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland (AP) — Investigators said Friday they believe sparklers burning on champagne bottles caused the fatal fire at a Swiss ski resort when they got too close to the roof of a bar packed with people celebrating New Year's Eve.

Authorities plan to investigate whether the ceiling material, designed to deaden sound, complied with regulations and whether the flares, which emit a stream of sparks upward, were permitted for use in the bar.

Forty people were killed and another 119 injured in the fire that devastated the busy Le Constellation bar in the Crans-Montana ski resort, according to authorities. It was one of the deadliest tragedies in Swiss history.

Authorities also announced they will examine other safety measures at the site, including fire extinguishers and escape routes. The attorney general of the Valais region warned of possible prosecutions if any criminal liability is found.

Arthur Brodard, 16, from the Swiss city of Lausanne, is among the missing. His mother, Laetitia, was in Crans-Montana on Friday and desperate to find him. He held out “a glimmer of hope” that he could be one of the six injured people who had not yet been identified.

"I'm looking everywhere. My son's body is somewhere," he told reporters. “I want to know where my son is, and be by his side, wherever he is, whether in the intensive care unit or in the morgue.”

The injured included 71 Swiss, 14 French and 11 Italian citizens, along with citizens of Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal and Poland, according to Frédéric Gisler, police commander of the Valais region. The nationalities of 14 other people have not been revealed.

A night of celebration turns into tragedy

Among the crowd was Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old from Paris, who said he felt like he was suffocating in the bar in the Swiss Alps where moments before he had been celebrating the New Year.

The teenager escaped the inferno, which broke out after midnight on Thursday, by smashing a window with a table. But about 40 partygoers died, including one of their friends, victims of one of the worst tragedies in Swiss history.

Many of the injured were between the ages of 19 and 25, according to police.

Clavier told The Associated Press that “two or three” of his friends were still missing hours after the disaster.

Late Thursday, mourners laid candles and flowers at a makeshift memorial. near the scene of the tragedy. Hundreds more prayed for the victims at the nearby Montana-Station Church.

A French teenager brought a bouquet of tulips to the regional hospital in Sion on Friday for her best friend, a 17-year-old classmate who suffered severe burns and was in intensive care. The two attend school together in Lausanne, said the girl, who was distraught and did not give her full name to the AP.

But when she arrived at the hospital, her friend had been heavily sedated for a dressing change and was unable to receive visitors. It was the latest in a series of heartbreaking moments for the teenager, who had planned to join a dozen schoolmates at the bar but ultimately decided against it.

She said she has since learned that two of the 12 are in a Zurich hospital. He did not know if the others survived.

On Instagram, an account was filled with photos of people still missing, with friends and family pleading for clues to the whereabouts of the missing.

“We have numerous stories of heroic actions, you could say, of very great solidarity at that time,” said Mathias Reynard, head of the Valais regional government, speaking to the RTS station on Friday. The president praised the work of the emergency services the day after the fire, but added that “in the first minutes it was the citizens – and mostly young people – who saved lives with their bravery.”

Waitresses arrived with lit sparklers

Clavier, the Parisian teenager, said he did not see how the fire started, but he did see the waitresses arrive with bottles of champagne with lit sparklers.

Two women told the French network BFMTV that they were inside when they saw a waiter carrying a companion on his shoulders when the woman was holding a lit sparkler in a bottle. The flames spread quickly and caused the wooden roof to collapse, they added.

One of them described a stampede of people trying to escape the nightclub, located in a basement, up a narrow staircase and out through a narrow door.

Another witness who spoke to BFMTV said that people broke windows to escape the fire, some with serious injuries, and that panicked parents rushed to the scene in their cars to see if their children were trapped. inside.

Gianni Campolo, a 19-year-old Swiss man on vacation in Crans-Montana, ran to the bar to help emergency crews after receiving a call from a friend who had escaped the inferno. He described scenes with people trapped lying on the floor, with serious injuries and burns.

“I have seen the horror and I don't know what could be worse than this,” he said in statements to TF1.

Marc-Antoine Chavanon, 14, joined the effort to get people out of the tavern.

“People were collapsing. We were doing everything we could to save them,” he said. "There was one of our friends, struggling to get out. She was badly burned. You can't imagine the pain I saw."

The severity of the burns has made it difficult to identify the bodies, which has required the families to provide DNA samples to the authorities. In some cases, the wallets and any identification documents inside turned to ashes in the flames.

Emanuele Galeppini, a promising 17-year-old Italian golfer who competed internationally, appears on the official list as one of the missing Italian citizens. His uncle Sebastiano Galeppini told the Italian news agency ANSA that his family is awaiting DNA tests, although the Italian Golf Federation on its website announced that he had died.

With high-altitude ski slopes, at some 3,000 meters (almost 9,850 feet), in the heart of the snow-capped peaks and pine forests of the Valais region, Crans-Montana is one of the main venues of the Cup circuit of the World. It also hosts the European Masters every August.

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Leicester reported from Sion, Switzerland, and Dazio from Berlin. Associated Press writers Geir Moulson in Berlin, Graham Dunbar in Geneva and Nicole Winfield and Giada Zampano in Rome contributed to this report.

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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.