The first victim of the deadly New Year’s Eve fire that tore through a bar at an Alpine ski resort has been named as a 17-year-old Italian golf prodigy.
Emmanuele Galeppini’s death was confirmed in an Instagram post by the Italian Golf Federation, which remembered the teen as a ‘young athlete who embodied passion and authentic values’.
‘In this time of great sorrow, our thoughts go out to his family and all those who loved him’, the tribute added.
Galeppini had been out partying at the ‘Le Constellation’ bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, when a deadly inferno broke out around an hour after midnight on New Years Eve, leaving over 40 people dead and another 115 injured.
The teenager, from Genova, was among the 13 missing Italians on a list released by the country’s Foreign Ministry yesterday.
Hos father had been out at the venue looking for him following reports of the fire, as his family launched an appeal to find find him.
Galeppini’s relatives suspected he had been out at the bar because they hadn’t heard from him since midnight, when his father reportedly spoke to him on the phone to wish him a happy birthday, according to reports.
The Italian teenager, who was based in Dubai, was a member of the Italian national team and his best rank was 2440th, and was well known in the UAE junior and amateur golfing scene, according to GolfDigestme.com.
He was pictured with golfing legend Rory McIlroy last year and was widely regarded as a promising young talent, competing regularly across the Middle East and Europe.
One of his most recent triumphs came at the 2025 Omega Dubai Creek Amateur Open last April.
As tributes poured in for Galeppini, desperate families were showing mobile phone photos of their young relatives in the resort of Crans-Montana to try and discover their fate in the basement bar fire.
A French mother called Laetitia in her 40s said she had been searching all night for her 16-year-old son Arthur.
‘I’ve been looking for him for over 30 hours,’ she told BFMTV, after trawling every hospital she could find in search of news in vain.
‘I don’t know which hospital he is in. I don’t know which morgue he is in. I don’t know which country he is in. I don’t know which canton he is in,’ she added, determined to find Arthur.
She said: ‘We’re not irresponsible parents for letting our 16-year-olds go out for the New Year. All the parents knew where their children were. They were celebrating with friends.’
And distraught French grandfather Pierre Pralong appealed on TV for any information about his missing granddaughter, Émilie, 22.
Having gone to Crans-Montana, Switzerland, that evening with two other friends, Émilie has not been heard from since, nor had she answered calls from her family and friends.
Her grandfather made an appeal on BFMTV on Thursday evening, January 1st, ‘for witnesses to people at the La Constellation bar who might have seen Émilie.’
‘Give us the information. Call me, call Grandpa,’ he said .
‘We always hope, we are full of hope.’
Like many families, Pierre was shaken by the speed of the fire. ‘She had a very serious life and the next day, she wasn’t there,’ he said.
‘It’s really something very hard for a grandfather, we got along very well, there was a lot of love between us,’ says Pralong.
He described the ‘agonizing’ wait the family is going through and calls the disaster a ‘dramatic’ accident. ‘The resort, but also the whole country, is shaken,’ he said.
‘We always hope, we are full of hope. It helps to overcome whatever the trials. Hope is clearly stronger than death,’
While he has ‘hope,’ particularly that his granddaughter is ‘in more or less good shape somewhere in a hospital,’ Pierre also wanted to be realistic about the possibility of another tragic event.
‘We have to be ready to accept a more difficult situation; we mustn’t dream, we have to be realistic in the face of a tragedy like this,’ he says.
Deeply moved and touched by the outpouring of sympathy, especially during the mass he attended to pay tribute to the victims and their loved ones, Pralong once again demonstrated resilience and hope on our airwaves: ‘Some knew it was my granddaughter, they came to greet me. I was the one who comforted the people who were crying.’
Swiss investigators are now probing what caused the fire at the Alpine ski resort bar.
Most injuries, many of them serious, occurred when the blaze swept through the crowded bar less that two hours after midnight on Thursday.
Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lit candle in a bottle. The flames spread, collapsing the wooden ceiling, they told the broadcaster.
People frantically tried to escape from the basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door, causing a crowd surge, one of the women said.
A young man at the scene said people smashed windows to escape the fire, some gravely injured, reported BFMTV.
He said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames, likening what happened to a horror movie.
While officials said Thursday it was too early to determine the fire’s cause, investigators have already ruled out the possibility of an attack.
Work is underway to identify the dead and inform their families, according to Valais Canton police commander Frédéric Gisler.
