Locked inside: Grief and anger as Pakistan hospital fire kills 14 newborns

KUALA LUMPUR, 26 AUGUST 2026 —

Islamabad, Pakistan — It was 6:30am on Wednesday when Arif Rana, 46, woke to a phone call.

The call came from her husband’s sister, who was attending to my sister, yelling and asking me to come up as a fire had erupted inside the ward,” he told Al Jazeera. Rana and his 20-year-old son, who was also with him at the hospital, rushed into the ward barefoot. They encountered smoke billowing from the building. As they climbed to the third floor, they found the corridors pitch-black and suffocatingly hot.

“It was hot, and I could hear so much yelling and panicked shouts, and I couldn’t even see due to darkness,” Rana recalled, sitting outside the ward hours after the incident. “The smoke made it hard to breathe.” He found his sister’s mother-in-law inside the ward and took her to safety. Outside, he found his sister and her newborn, who had been rescued by his sister-in-law.

“It was only due to her [the sister-in-law’s] courage and bravery that my sister, her newborn survived, otherwise, they too could have died in there,” he said quietly, just as 14 other newborns had, in the hospital’s critical care nursery down the corridor. According to hospital management, the fire was caused by a short circuit in the nursery’s air-conditioning unit. The nursery had 15 newborns in it at the time. Only one was rescued.

It was not the first time a fault in hospital air conditioning has killed newborns in Pakistan. In June 2024, a similar fire tore through the paediatric ward of Sahiwal Teaching Hospital in Punjab province, killing 11 babies. Punjab’s Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz, the niece of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, later ordered the arrest of the hospital’s medical superintendent and three senior doctors after inquiries found that the hospital’s fire extinguishers had expired.

Accounts of exactly when rescuers reached the ward on Wednesday differ. A statement from the Islamabad district administration put the first emergency call at 6:45am, with fire tenders and ambulances reaching the hospital within seven minutes. An official at the headquarters of Rescue 1122 — the government-run ambulance, fire and rescue service — told Al Jazeera that separate stations logged fires at different times as calls were relayed.

His own station received word at 6:55am and reached the hospital less than 10 minutes later. A video he recorded on arrival, which he later showed Al Jazeera, was timestamped 7:06am. “When we tried to enter the building, it was inaccessible and we could see smoke coming out from the building. We had to break the concrete grills, behind which were windows.

We had to break those windows, and through them we were able to rescue people,” a fireman told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media. Kamran Riaz, from Rawalpindi, was also at the hospital, holding his five-year-old nephew in his lap. Some 50 metres away, Riaz’s elder brother — and the nephew’s father — was in the hospital morgue, submitting a DNA sample.

The brother’s baby daughter, born only three days earlier, was among the 14 who died in the fire. She had been admitted to the nursery because of breathing problems. “We have no clarity on what is going on, and what we need to do now,” Riaz said.

“But from what little my brother told me, there was little to no staff presence in the morning when fire broke out, and there was only one entrance and exit, while the second one was blocked.” Several witnesses with relatives admitted to different wards in the maternity unit described a similar experience. The Mother and Child Hospital at PIMS has two wings, one older and one newly constructed.

The fire broke out on the third floor of the older wing, which has one main entrance and exit. The emergency exits, witnesses said, were blocked from inside. Several people at the hospital told Al Jazeera that renovation work had been under way somewhere inside the building in recent weeks, although no one could provide details about its scope or location.

Samina Waqar, 30, had also spent the night at the hospital with her sister, who had given birth by caesarean section the previous day. “My brother-in-law wanted to go and see his wife, and when he tried to go there in the morning, that is when he heard the screaming and yelling, and he called me immediately about the fire,” she told Al Jazeera.

Waqar said she ran towards the ward to help with the rescue. Her sister, despite having undergone surgery the previous day, managed to walk out on her own, while her brother-in-law carried the newborn to safety. “Our ward was right across the nursery where fire broke out, and the entire floor was full of smoke and heat. I don’t even know how we managed to bring them back, along with few other new mothers.

It was all a blur for me,” she said. The wife of Sardar Atee Rehman, 39, was also among those in the ward next to the nursery after giving birth to a daughter the previous day. “My wife called me around 6.30am in the morning, yelling that there is a fire somewhere and smoke is filling up her ward, and asked me to rush inside,” he said.

Rehman said the security staff inside had been helpful, but he was unable to spot any nurses or a doctor. Several other witnesses made similar observations. Some relatives later said hospital staff had been present overnight but fled when the fire broke out, which some described as a natural reaction to panic. PIMS’s administration gave a different account.