Fire tore through the nursery of the largest government hospital in Pakistan’s capital on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, killing 14 newborn babies in a blaze that rescue officials initially traced to an air-conditioning compressor that exploded in the room where the infants were being cared for.
The first emergency call went out about 6:45 a.m., the Islamabad district administration said. The nursery of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad held at least 15 newborns as the fire started; one baby was pulled out alive. Federal Health Minister Mustafa Kamal confirmed that 14 babies died.
Flames never left the nursery, part of the hospital’s gynecology ward, and no other section of the sprawling public facility was touched. Crews brought the blaze under control shortly after they arrived and then started cooling the site, according to local media reports. Outside the Mother and Child Health (MCH) ward, security personnel took up positions as ambulances lined up, word spread and families rushed in.
Two doctors and two nurses were on duty. The ward’s emergency exit was blocked and locked, according to rescue sources and eyewitnesses, and teams had to cut through walls and metal grilles and break windows to get in. The single survivor was a newborn girl. Rescuers also carried four other babies and three mothers out of an adjoining room, and moved 73 patients in the adjoining gynaecology ward to safety.
Grief and Anger Outside the Ward
Police were deployed at the hospital. A crush of parents, grandparents and other relatives surged in the direction of the maternity building. Some sank to the ground weeping; others demanded that someone answer for what had happened, and pressed a question officials had nothing to say to yet — how the ward holding the building’s most fragile patients had ended up in flames.
Speaking by telephone, Noreen Khan, a senior nurse at PIMS, told CBS News: “The scene is unbearable in the ward.” A day or two of life was all the infants who were lost had had, she said.
A newborn nephew was among the dead for Amir Abbasi, who said the boy was the first born into his family in years. Only a day earlier, he recalled, he had touched the baby’s face and held his hand. Nearby, a mother sobbed outside the hospital and demanded that her child be given back to her, saying she wanted justice.
Three days earlier she had given birth, said a woman whom the Associated Press identified as Mrs. Mohammad Sami; her infant, she said, was in intensive care inside the nursery when the flames erupted. Words failed her, she said, and there was no one she could blame; the only thing she knew was that her child was gone. Hospital staff told the relatives that the bodies would be released once the necessary documentation was completed, according to Sami.
Some families in the building that morning were spared. Muneeba, who was at the hospital visiting relatives, said she got out along with her nephew and her sister-in-law. “Thank God our baby is safe,” she told CNN. A three-day-old baby had been killed, another father told reporters as he stood outside the hospital, saying no one could understand the pain he was carrying.
Inquiries Ordered and a Health Secretary Removed
A government notification shows the Islamabad district magistrate appointed a multi-agency fact-finding committee and gave it 24 hours to report back. Its instructions: pin down the cause of the fire and how it spread, establish whether adequate fire-safety measures were in place in the nursery, and assess how the emergency response was handled.
Families at the hospital gates were shouting those same questions. Whether firefighting equipment in the nursery had been in working order was one thing relatives said they wanted answered; the other was how an air-conditioning unit in a room full of newborns had been permitted to fail so catastrophically. Supervising the inquiry himself was the plan of the health minister, Kamal, who said he was flying in to the capital from Karachi.
The health director-general and the federal health secretary had already reached PIMS, he told Pakistan’s Geo News. Contact had been established with the affected families, he said, and the first task, he added, was to support the parents and return their babies to them. A further step came on Wednesday from Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who suspended Federal Health Secretary Aslam Ghauri.
Captain (retd) Muhammad Mahmood, Secretary Housing, was given additional charge as health secretary after Ghauri was suspended and removed from his post. Sharif also constituted a separate high-level inquiry committee under former interior secretary Shahid Khan — a five-member body that, as of August 28, includes Secretary Establishment Dr Barrister Nabeel Awan. An interim report from it is due within 48 hours, with a final report within five days.
The ward’s emergency exits were permanently closed and its evacuation routes obstructed, according to a fire brigade report by the Capital Development Authority, which also said hospital security staff hindered firefighters during the initial response — the locked doors that relatives described at the gates. That account was rejected by PIMS. All emergency exits were open and functional while the fire burned, the hospital said, and staff fought the blaze with 35 fire extinguishers and other safety equipment.
The hospital’s own preliminary account placed the first spark inside the nursery at about 6:38 a.m. Oxygen points at each incubator, it said, turned the flames into a fast-moving fire within seconds; the infants died of burns and the loss of their oxygen supply. A version of that account reported on August 28 describes a spark seen near an air conditioner at about 6:38 a.m., a loud explosion at 6:39 a.m., part of the ceiling collapsing, and the fire moving through the nursery within about a minute. The city administration said the prime minister’s committee has reached no conclusion of its own and will determine the cause independently. On Thursday, August 27, the 14 babies were buried in their families’ home towns.
By August 27, investigators appointed by the prime minister had begun visiting the PIMS nursery to probe the blaze, and a vigil was held for the 14 newborns.
Shock Ripples Across Pakistan
Grief over the deaths spread far beyond the hospital compound. Sharif ordered an immediate investigation and expressed sorrow, saying a tragedy that takes children leaves a loss that cannot be repaired. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi voiced sorrow over the fire as well.
Condolences went to the families from President Asif Ali Zardari, who called the deaths heartbreaking and impossible to make good. Whoever was at fault should be named and prosecuted, he demanded, and he pressed hospitals nationwide — the wards that care for newborns above all — to put effective fire-safety measures and emergency procedures in place.
Patients come to PIMS from across the region because they cannot afford private care; it is the largest government-run hospital in Islamabad. Deliveries and infant care go on around the clock in its maternity building, the site where the fire broke out.
Paperwork and a body to carry home was what it all came down to for the parents who turned up on Wednesday to visit babies born within the past few days. Whether anyone is held responsible now depends on what the inquiries conclude about the cause, the alarms and the response — and on whether the safeguards Zardari demanded ever reach the wards where the youngest patients sleep.