Crans-Montana fire: a victims’ lawyer points out the “risk of destruction of evidence” on the part of the bar managers

Every image could count. Photos and videos taken on the terrible night of December 31, 2025 to January 1, 2026 inside the Constellation bar could help investigators determine what exactly happened at the establishment, where a devastating fire killed 40 people who were celebrating the start of the new year.

This Wednesday, January 7 at the microphone of France info, Romain Jordan, lawyer for the families of several Swiss victims, was surprised that the couple of managers of the establishment had not been placed in pre-trial detention, nor placed under house arrest by the authorities. “Until now, we have not had any concrete elements that suggest a leak,” the attorney general of the canton of Valais, Béatrice Pilloud, explained on Tuesday.

Jacques and Jessica Moretti, the French owners of the bar Le Constellation, said in a statement that they were “devastated and overcome by grief”. But Romain Jordan warns of the “risk of destruction of evidence”

Access to social networks suspended “while the establishment was still on fire”

“In the early morning, while the establishment was still on fire, the operators of the Le Constellation bar, or someone close to them, suspended access to the Facebook pages, to all the establishment’s social networks, where photos and videos of the evening appeared,” he points out to France Info. “This is precisely what I call a risk of destruction of evidence,” he insists. Let us specify that at present, to our knowledge, there is nothing formally proving the intention to destroy evidence on the part of the managers, who remain presumed innocent.

But “everyone was able to see that the digital data and videos from the same evening were no longer accessible. Who considers, while their establishment is burning, that it is an imperative task? This clearly demonstrates that there was awareness of a problem and that we sought to minimize it,” argues Romain Jordan.

The Swiss media 24 Heures explains that “the bar’s official social networks were deleted on the morning of January 1.” Another Facebook page, now inaccessible, showed “photo after photo, the transformation project carried out between June and December 2015” inside the bar.

“The photo albums reveal the artisanal nature of the work. No identifiable company, disparate outfits, no protective equipment: the images suggest a renovation carried out with limited resources, possibly in-house,” summarizes the media.

The president of the municipality of Crans-Montana admitted that he did not know why periodic inspections of the bar had not been carried out from 2020 to 2025, when these inspections must be carried out every year.