Islamabad, Pakistan — It was ۶:۳۰am on Wednesday when Arif Rana, ۴۶, woke to a phone call. He had been asleep on the lawn outside the maternity unit of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Islamabad’s largest public-sector hospital.
“My sister gave birth to a baby girl on Tuesday, and she was admitted in the general ward of the hospital. 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 ۲۰-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 ۱۴ 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 ۱۵ 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 ۲۰۲۴, a similar fire tore through the paediatric ward of Sahiwal Teaching Hospital in Punjab province, killing ۱۱ 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.
Conflicting accounts
Accounts of exactly when rescuers reached the ward on Wednesday differ.
A statement from the Islamabad district administration put the first emergency call at ۶:۴۵am, with fire tenders and ambulances reaching the hospital within seven minutes.
An official at the headquarters of Rescue ۱۱۲۲ — 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 ۶:۵۵am and reached the hospital less than ۱۰ minutes later. A video he recorded on arrival, which he later showed Al Jazeera, was timestamped ۷:۰۶am.
“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 ۵۰ 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 ۱۴ 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.
Questions over exits
Samina Waqar, ۳۰, 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, ۳۹, 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 ۶.۳۰am 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.
The hospital’s executive director, Rana Imran Sikandar, said two doctors and four nurses had been on duty in the intensive care unit when the fire began.
Federal Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, speaking to reporters at the hospital, repeated the same figures.
Abdul Ghaffoor, a ۲۶-year-old from Rawalpindi who was attending to his mother, said he saw the commotion outside the ward and ran for help.
“I heard that staff keeps the exits and doors locked because it is a maternity ward and they want to ensure that men are not allowed, while also there have been numerous cases of baby stealing, and that is why the staff keeps exits locked,” he said.
PIMS officials gave reporters much the same explanation.
Access to the nursery was restricted, they said, as part of a longstanding policy intended to prevent infants from being stolen from the ward, rather than a lapse specific to Wednesday’s fire.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered an investigation into the fire and later suspended the federal health secretary, Aslam Ghaury.
Two separate inquiry committees, one formed by the Islamabad district administration and another by the prime minister’s office, have been tasked with determining what went wrong.
Waqar, whose sister survived the ordeal, was furious with the hospital administration, blaming it for negligence and failing to provide adequate protection for patients, particularly newborns.
“This is a nursery for critical infants, if one place had to have most immediate attention for safety, it was this room, and yet the criminal attitude led to this tragedy,” she said.
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