Kombos offers condolences for ‘tragedy’ in Crans Montana

Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos on Thursday evening said he had contacted his Swiss counterpart Ignazio Cassis to offer his condolences in the aftermath of an fire at a bar in the ski resort of Crans Montana which killed around 50 people and injured around 100.

He described the incident as a “tragedy” and said that “our thoughts are with the victims, the injured, and their loved ones”.

“We will continue to monitor the situation and remain in close contact with the Swiss authorities,” he said.

The Swiss embassy in Nicosia on Friday thanked Kombos for his “expressions of sympathy” in the aftermath of the incident, adding that “your warm words remind us of the compassion and humanity we share”.

“Such solidarity is deeply reassuring and greatly valued,” it said.

The fire broke out in the early hours of New Year’s Day at a bar called “Le Constellation”, with it initially having been believed that there had been an explosion. As yet, the cause of the fire remains unclear.

Some reports are describing the fire as a “flashover”, which was described to the BBC by the United Kingdom’s association of fire investigators’ chief Richard Hagger as “a rapid development of fire within a compartment”.

“You’ll start with a fire; the flames and the thermal radiation will go to the ceiling level and mushroom out across. That thermal radiation then travels downwards on to other fuel packages, such as furniture, tables, raises the temperature to the point when they thermally decompose and produce flammable gas,” he said.

“And then that gas ignites, but it ignites at a fairly rapid rate. So, the room, in effect, becomes a full room on fire within a matter of seconds.”

The resort of Crans Montana is also indelibly linked to recent Cypriot history, having been the location of the most recent formal negotiations aimed at solving the Cyprus problem in 2017.

The talks took place in July of that year and had seemed promising, but were abruptly halted, and have never since resumed.

News agency Reuters at the time cited a source which said that United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had “finally called a halt at 2am after a session marred by yelling and drama”.

Since then, many who were party to the talks have said it was then President Nicos Anastasiades who left the negotiation table, with some reports in the intervening years suggesting that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was involved in “sabotaging” the talks.

Anastasiades has denied that he is to blame for the collapse of talks at Crans Montana, instead saying earlier this year that Turkey’s refusal to accept an abandonment of the Treaty of Guarantee, which allows Cyprus’ three guarantor powers to use force to intervene on the island should its legal order be disrupted.

“I will not comment at this stage on the unsubstantiated allegations that the conference was interrupted because the former president allegedly abandoned the negotiations, which is why the talks collapsed,” he said, adding that he would “address this matter later”.

Last year, former Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat had said that it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who had convinced Anastasiades to collapse the negotiations.

“The reason Anastasiades flipped the table at Crans Montana is because Netanyahu said, ‘are you crazy? Why would you include Turkish Cypriots in the government? Why would you make them partners? Now, when you are governing Cyprus and representing all of Cyprus globally, what would the Turkish Cypriots be doing there?’,” he recounted.

He said he had been told this “by Greek Cypriots”, before going on to point out that relations between the Republic of Cyprus and the State of Israel are “improving”.