World News
Fourteen newborn babies die in a locked nursery at Islamabad's largest public hospital
By Staff Writer | 27 August 2026
Fifteen infants were in the critical care nursery when fire took hold shortly after half past six on Wednesday morning. One was carried out alive. The doors had been kept locked to stop babies being taken.
Fourteen newborn babies died on Wednesday in a fire on the third floor of the Mother and Child Hospital at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, the largest public sector hospital in Islamabad. Fifteen infants were in the nursery when it started. One was rescued.
The health minister told reporters the fire began with an explosion in an air conditioning unit serving the children's intensive care ward. Hospital management described a short circuit in the nursery's air conditioning. The two accounts have not been reconciled and no inquiry has reported.
The presence of oxygen in the ward caused the fire to intensify
Mustafa Kamal, Health Minister of Pakistan
What both accounts agree on is what happened next. A critical care nursery is a room full of piped oxygen and plastic, and an ignition source in it does not produce an ordinary compartment fire.
Regardless of how the explosion occurred, the fire spread because of the oxygen supply
Tariq Fazl Chaudhry, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs of Pakistan
One way in, and it was locked
The older of the hospital's two maternity wings has a single main entrance and exit. Relatives who ran into the building described corridors in darkness and heat, and emergency exits that would not open from inside. Rescue crews reached the ward from the rear by breaking the concrete grilles fixed over the windows, and then the windows behind them.
Hospital officials and relatives gave the same reason for the locked doors, and it was not a lapse on the day. Access to the maternity unit is restricted under a longstanding policy meant to keep men out of the ward and to stop infants being taken from it. The policy had been in force for years.
A security measure and a means of escape are the same door, and only one of them can win. Grilles over windows, a single protected route out of a high dependency ward, and an oxygen supply that turns a small ignition into a flashover: on any fire strategy those are three separate items on the risk register, and here they met in one room at half past six in the morning.
The timings do not agree either
The district administration recorded the first emergency call at 6.45am, with fire tenders and ambulances at the hospital within seven minutes. An official at the government rescue service said separate stations logged the fire at different times as calls were relayed, that his own station heard at 6.55am and arrived in under ten minutes, and that a video he took on arrival carried a timestamp of 7.06am. Six fire engines and four ambulances took part.
Accounts of who was on duty also differ. The hospital's executive director said two doctors and four nurses were in the intensive care unit when the fire began. The parliamentary affairs minister said two doctors, a nurse and other staff were present and remained safe. Several relatives said they saw security staff but no clinicians in the first minutes.
The federal health secretary has been suspended. Two inquiries are running, one set up by the Islamabad district administration and one by the prime minister's office. The district committee, chaired by an additional deputy commissioner and drawing in the development authority, the police, the electricity supplier, the hospital and the emergency service, was told to report within twenty four hours and to say whether working fire safety measures were in place at all.
The cause of the fire cannot be determined at this stage
Tariq Fazl Chaudhry, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs of Pakistan
This is not the first time. In June 2024 a fire in the paediatric ward of Sahiwal Teaching Hospital in Punjab province killed eleven babies, and the inquiry that followed found the extinguishers had passed their expiry date. Two years on, the question the Islamabad committee has been given twenty four hours to answer is the same one.