Owner of Swiss Bar Where 40 People Died Allowed to Go Free Amid Criminal Probe
(Bloomberg) — The female co-owner of the Crans-Montana bar where 40 people died in a fire in the early hours of New Year’s Day, will not be held in jail amid a criminal investigation.
Jessica Moretti, who ran Le Constellation with her husband Jacques Moretti, was questioned by prosecutors on Friday along with him. A court in the local canton of Valais said on Tuesday it ordered that she must surrender her ID documents to authorities, also report daily to a police station and provide bail, an amount which is still being worked out.
“All defendants are presumed innocent until a conviction becomes final,” the court said. “The cardinal principle in Swiss criminal procedure is therefore that the defendant remains at liberty” until trial the court said, particularly given Valais prosecutors had not requested her detention.
Jacques Moretti was on Monday ordered to be detained for three months, but the same court said it would consider alternative measures to detention.
The scandal has shaken the country, particularly given the revelations about failures at the two-storey bar, and also by local authorities who are supposed to enforce fire safety. Officials have admitted that the bar hadn’t been checked and inspected for safety since 2019.
The focus of the current criminal investigation into one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies has focused on the couple and their management of the bar. A service door that might have offered a second escape route at the bar was locked at the time of the incident, he told prosecutors according to Swiss broadcaster RTS.
The fire appears to have originated with sparklers held aloft in champagne bottles setting the highly flammable foam ablaze, prosecutors have said. Jacques Moretti bought sound-proofing foam from a hardware store and attached it himself to the bar’s ceilings, according to the RTS report.
(Adds fire safety inspection failures in fifth paragraph. An earlier version corrected the identity of the co-owner in a court decision.)
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