Fire kills at least 14 newborns at Pakistan's top public hospital, prompting health secretary's dismissal

A fire tore through the newborn nursery of Pakistan's largest state-run hospital in Islamabad before dawn on Wednesday, killing at least 14 infants and prompting Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to order an immediate investigation and remove the country's top health bureaucrat from his post within hours of the blaze.

The fire broke out shortly before 7 a.m. local time on the third floor of the Mother and Child Health ward at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, known as PIMS, the country's flagship public hospital and a major referral center for the capital and surrounding regions. Health Minister Mustafa Kamal said the blaze began when an air-conditioning compressor exploded inside the neonatal unit, and that oxygen lines feeding incubators helped the fire spread within a sealed ward where escape was effectively impossible for the infants inside.

The toll

Officials put the confirmed death toll at 14 newborns, with one outlet, Geo News, reporting a fifteenth death overnight; hospital and government accounts agree that 15 or 16 infants were in the nursery when the fire started and that only one was pulled out alive. Rescue crews, including six fire engines and four ambulances, reached the ward within minutes, but firefighters and hospital staff described a nursery where newborns dependent on incubators, ventilators and oxygen support had no way to be moved quickly once smoke filled the room.

The dead ranged from hours old to a few days old, according to Pakistani officials cited by Al Jazeera. Islamabad's chief commissioner, Sohail Ashraf, said bodies were being released to families as paperwork was completed through the day, and hospital administrators said they had asked some parents for DNA samples to confirm the identities of infants whose remains could not otherwise be distinguished.

Accounts of the response inside the ward conflicted sharply within hours of the fire. Rescue officials told the Pakistani daily The News that there was no water available at the fire point when crews arrived, that couplings were missing from the fire hose, and that emergency evacuation routes out of the ward had been locked, with no staff seen deploying extinguishing equipment before firefighters arrived. PIMS's executive director, Rana Imran Sikandar, disputed that account, saying two doctors and four nurses were on duty in the unit and that one of them pulled the surviving infant to safety. A hospital spokesperson, Dr. Aneeza Jalil, said investigators' early assessment pointed to an electrical short circuit rather than any single act of negligence, a preliminary finding officials said would be refined once technical experts had examined the burned-out ward.

A recurring hazard

PIMS is not a small or peripheral facility. Established in 1985, the complex includes a 592-bed general hospital, a 230-bed children's hospital and a 125-bed maternal and child health centre that houses the neonatal ward where Wednesday's fire started. It is the hospital many families in Islamabad and the surrounding region rely on because they cannot afford private care, and its maternity and newborn units are routinely stretched beyond their intended capacity.

Fires in public buildings are a recurring problem in Pakistan, where fire codes exist on paper but are inconsistently enforced in older government buildings, and electrical systems are frequently overloaded or poorly maintained. In January, a fire tore through the Gul Plaza shopping centre in Karachi and killed 80 people, an inferno that investigators later found had spread through blocked exits and an air-conditioning duct in a building with no working extinguishers. Safety inspectors and engineers in Pakistan have repeatedly flagged aging wiring and inadequate suppression systems in public buildings, including hospitals, as a known risk rather than a new one. Wednesday's blaze is already being described by Pakistani officials as among the deadliest hospital fires in the country's recent history.

The families affected were, almost by definition, among those with the fewest alternatives. PIMS's maternity and newborn wards serve low- and middle-income families from Islamabad and the neighbouring Rawalpindi district who cannot afford private hospital care, and its neonatal intensive care unit is one of relatively few in the capital equipped to keep premature or medically fragile infants alive. Pakistan already has one of the highest newborn mortality rates in the world, a burden that the World Health Organization's regional office tracks alongside other South Asian countries, and health workers say that burden falls hardest on families who depend on crowded, under-resourced public wards precisely like the one that burned on Wednesday.

Anger, grief and a swift dismissal

The fire set off an unusually fast chain of political consequences. President Asif Ali Zardari called the deaths "heartbreaking and an irreparable loss," while Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif cut short other business to chair an emergency meeting on the fire, telling officials that "the circumstances surrounding the incident should be thoroughly examined, those responsible should be identified, and the strictest possible action should be taken." During that meeting, Sharif ordered the immediate suspension of the federal health secretary, Aslam Ghori, and had him asked to leave the room, an unusually blunt public rebuke for a serving civil servant. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, who briefed reporters afterward, said most of the infants died of smoke inhalation and asphyxiation rather than burns, as the fire spread rapidly once it reached the oxygen lines feeding the ward's incubators.

Outside the hospital, grief quickly turned into anger among parents who had been kept away from the ward while their children were on oxygen and monitoring equipment. One mother, identified only as Javeria, confronted hospital staff, according to a report carried by the South China Morning Post.

"Give me my child. I want justice."

Several parents told reporters gathered outside the ward that the nursery's doors had been mostly shut when the fire started and questioned why fire-safety measures had not been sufficient to allow staff to evacuate infants in time.

What happens next

Islamabad's district administration, which oversees the capital territory where PIMS sits, has formed an eight-member fact-finding committee led by an additional deputy commissioner, with a 24-hour deadline to determine the exact cause of the fire, how it spread and whether fire-safety measures in the ward were adequate. The panel includes representatives of the Capital Emergency Service, Islamabad police, the electricity utility IESCO and Islamabad's Capital Development Authority, the agency responsible for building standards and infrastructure in the federal capital, alongside PIMS's own administration.

Health Minister Kamal said he flew from Karachi to Islamabad to personally oversee the response and the investigation, and that the government would announce compensation for the affected families once the death toll was finalized. Pakistan's information ministry, whose press information department distributes official government statements, is expected to publish further findings from the inquiry as they are confirmed. Sharif's office has said additional personnel changes and disciplinary steps could follow depending on what investigators determine about how the ward's electrical and fire-safety systems were maintained, and whether existing safety protocols for neonatal units were followed on the night of the fire.

The committee's 24-hour reporting deadline, set on the day of the fire, means an initial finding on the cause is expected within days, though Pakistani officials cautioned that establishing full responsibility, including whether the air-conditioning unit had passed recent safety inspections, is likely to take longer. In the meantime, PIMS's neonatal service remains under scrutiny, and families with infants elsewhere in the hospital's maternity wards have been given updates on evacuation procedures while the damaged section of the ward is assessed and repaired.