Islamabad, Pakistan — It was 6:30am on Wednesday when Arif Rana, 46, 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. 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.
Outside, he found his sister and her newborn, who had been rescued by his sister-in-law. 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.
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. We had to break the concrete grills, behind which were windows.
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