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 115, many of them seriously.

Parents of missing youths anxiously 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 says.

What caused the blaze was unclear. Swiss authorities said it appeared to be an accident rather than an attack. Some accounts from survivors and footage broadcast on social media suggested that the ceiling of the bar’s basement may have caught fire when sparkling candles got too close.

Residents of Crans-Montana, which has the distinction of being not only a popular draw for skiers but also golfers, were stunned by the inferno. Many knew victims and some said they were lucky not to have been there themselves. Hundreds of people stood in silence near the scene as they came to pay their respects to the victims on Thursday night.

“You think you’re safe here, but this can happen anywhere. They were people like us,” says Piermarco Pani, an 18-year-old who, like many others in the town, knew the bar well.