Fire tore through the newborn nursery of the largest government hospital in Pakistan’s capital on August 26, 2026, killing 14 babies. Rescue officials initially blamed an air-conditioning compressor that exploded in the nursery where the infants were being cared for.
The Islamabad district administration said the first emergency call came in about 6:45 a.m. The nursery at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad held at least 15 newborns when the fire broke out. Federal Health Minister Mustafa Kamal confirmed that 14 babies died. One baby was pulled out alive.
The nurse who carried that infant out has been identified as Razia Noreen, who gave her first interview to international media in Islamabad on September 1. She had just checked the 15 babies in her care and was preparing injections in an adjoining room, she said, when she saw flames. She dropped the syringe and ran in, lifted a baby to her chest to shield it from fire and smoke, and carried it out. Security camera footage shows she was inside for eight seconds. She handed the newborn to a doctor and turned back toward the flames.
“I wanted to save the others,” Razia Noreen told The Associated Press, “I did not lose hope.” She is to receive the Sitara-i-Khidmat (Star of Service) civil decoration.
The fire broke out in the nursery, part of the hospital’s gynecology ward. Crews knocked it down soon after arriving and then began cooling the site, according to local media reports. Outside the Mother and Child Health (MCH) ward, security personnel took up positions, ambulances lined up and families rushed in as word spread.
Grief and Anger Outside the Ward
Police were posted at the hospital as parents, grandparents and other relatives pressed toward the maternity building. Some collapsed in tears. Others shouted for accountability and demanded an answer no official could yet give: how a nursery holding the most fragile patients in the building had come to burn.
“The scene is unbearable in the ward,” Noreen Khan, a senior nurse at PIMS, told CBS News by telephone. The infants who were lost, she said, had been alive for barely a day or two.
Amir Abbasi’s newborn nephew died in the fire — the first boy born into his family in years, he said. Only a day earlier, he recalled, he had touched the baby’s face and held his hand. Close by, a mother sobbed outside the hospital, demanding that her child be given back to her and saying she wanted justice.
A woman the Associated Press identified as Mohammad Sami had given birth three days before. Her infant was under intensive care inside the nursery at the moment the flames broke out, she said. She had no words, and no one to blame; all she knew was that her child was gone. According to Sami, staff told the families the bodies would be released once paperwork was finished.
Not every family in the building that morning suffered the same loss. Muneeba, who was at the hospital visiting relatives, said she made it out along with her nephew and her sister-in-law. “Thank God our baby is safe,” she told CNN. Outside the hospital, another father told reporters that his three-day-old baby had been killed, and that no one could understand the pain he was carrying.
Two Inquiries and a Suspended Health Secretary
A government notification shows the Islamabad district magistrate appointed a multi-agency fact-finding committee and gave it 24 hours to report back. The panel was told to pin down what caused the fire and how it spread, to gauge how the emergency response was handled, and to establish whether adequate fire-safety measures were in place in the nursery.
Those were the same questions families were shouting at the hospital gates. Did the nursery have working firefighting equipment, relatives asked, and why had an air-conditioning unit in a room of newborns been allowed to fail so catastrophically?
Kamal, the health minister, flew in from Karachi to the capital to supervise the inquiry himself. He told Pakistan’s Geo News that the federal health secretary and the health director-general were already at PIMS. Officials were in touch with the affected families, he said, and the first task was to support the parents and return their babies to them.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif went further on August 26. He suspended Federal Health Secretary Muhammad Aslam Ghauri and constituted a separate high-level inquiry committee under former Interior Secretary Shahid Khan. That panel was to hand in an interim report within 48 hours and a final one within five days.
That interim report landed on August 29, and Sharif ordered eight officials suspended and departmental and criminal proceedings opened against them. The committee found no approved fire or neonatal evacuation procedures, inadequate detection and containment systems, locked or obstructed emergency exits, understaffing, and a failure to act on the recommendations of an earlier fire inquiry in July.
A Capital Development Authority fire brigade report found emergency exits at the ward permanently closed and evacuation routes obstructed. It also said that during the initial response, hospital security staff hindered firefighters — the locked doors relatives had described at the gates. It logged the fire starting at 6:38 a.m. on closed-circuit footage, the first call at 6:54 and the first engine on scene at 7:01, and gave a probable cause of an electrical short circuit or plug overload. The hospital rejected that account. All emergency exits were open and functional during the fire, PIMS said, and staff fought the blaze with 35 fire extinguishers and other safety equipment.
In a preliminary account of its own, PIMS said the blast came from a nebulizer attached to an incubator to monitor oxygen levels, and that oxygen feeding the incubators turned it into a fast-moving fire within seconds; the infants died of burns and the loss of their oxygen supply. That account ruled out both a short circuit and an air-conditioning compressor explosion, and it comes from the institution under investigation. The government inquiry did not adopt it: having examined air conditioners, incubators, warmers and electrical faults, the committee found an internal electrical or equipment-related origin plausible but concluded that “the precise ignition source remains technically unresolved.”
On September 1 the National Assembly Standing Committee on National Health Services rejected the preliminary inquiry report as inadequate, with members calling the episode criminal negligence.
The 14 babies were buried in their families’ home towns on Thursday, August 27.
Shock Ripples Across Pakistan
Grief spread well past the hospital compound. Sharif ordered an immediate investigation and expressed sorrow. A tragedy that claims children, he said, is a loss that cannot be repaired, and he later promised no leniency for officials found guilty of criminal negligence. State Minister for Interior Tallal Chaudhry said rescue teams had reached the ward within six minutes.
President Asif Ali Zardari called the deaths heartbreaking and impossible to make good, and he offered condolences to the families. Responsibility for the incident should be determined and action taken in accordance with the law, he said, and he urged hospitals across the country, singling out wards that care for newborns, to put effective fire-safety measures and emergency procedures in place.
The largest government-run hospital in Islamabad, PIMS draws patients from across the region who cannot afford private care. The maternity building where the fire started handles deliveries and treats infants around the clock.
For the parents who arrived on August 26 to visit babies born within the past few days, the morning came down to paperwork and a body to carry home. On September 3, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Tariq Fazal Chaudhry said criminal cases would begin to be registered against those responsible within two to three days. As of September 4 none had been registered, no arrests had been made and no compensation had been announced.