Fire tore through the newborn nursery of the largest government hospital in Pakistan’s capital on August 26, 2026, killing 14 babies. Three days later, the inquiry ordered into the blaze reported back — and said it still could not say what started it.
The first emergency call went out about 6:45 a.m., the Islamabad district administration said. The nursery at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) held at least 15 newborns when the fire began; one baby was pulled out alive. Federal Health Minister Mustafa Kamal confirmed that 14 babies died. No other part of the hospital caught fire — the flames stayed inside the nursery, part of the gynecology ward — and television footage showed rescue workers using ladders to reach it on the third floor through broken windows.
Grief and Anger Outside the Ward
Relatives pressed toward the maternity building as police took up positions. Some collapsed in tears. Others shouted for accountability, demanding an answer no official could yet give: how a nursery holding the most fragile patients in the building had come to burn.
“The scene is unbearable in the ward,” Noreen Khan, a senior nurse at PIMS, told CBS News by telephone. Barely a day or two of life was all the infants who were lost had had, she said. Among the dead was a newborn nephew of Amir Abbasi — the first boy born into his family in years. Only a day earlier, he recalled, he had touched the baby’s face and held his hand. On Thursday, August 27, the 14 babies were buried in their families’ hometowns.
Eight Suspended, Criminal Proceedings Ordered
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif suspended Federal Health Secretary Aslam Ghauri that Wednesday and removed him from the post, then constituted a high-level inquiry committee under former interior secretary Shahid Khan.
Khan’s committee delivered its interim report on Saturday, August 29, and Sharif acted the same day. Eight officials were suspended, his office said, and departmental and criminal proceedings ordered against those the committee identified: the hospital’s executive director, two joint executive directors, the head of the neonatal department, two other doctors, the assistant director for security and the head of the Capital Development Authority’s emergency services. Action was also ordered against officials of the security contractor.
The findings are a catalogue of things that were not there. The nursery had no fire alarm and no sprinkler system. Of the hospital’s 13 standard operating procedures, only two subsections mentioned fire or emergencies, and the committee could not establish that the ward had a rehearsed evacuation plan for newborns — no written answer to who raises the alarm, who calls for help, who takes command, who unlocks the exits. Supervisory staff was not on duty when the fire began. Emergency services were not called until six minutes after it started, and the first responders arrived 15 minutes after that call.
On the question the families have been asking since Wednesday, the committee returned no answer. Investigators weighed an air conditioner, an incubator or infant warmer, a short circuit and an overloaded plug, and found an internal electrical or equipment-related origin plausible without pinning the fire on any one device. “The precise ignition source remains technically unresolved,” the report said. The hospital’s own preliminary account had blamed a nebulizer attached to an incubator and ruled out a compressor and a short circuit; rescue officials had pointed at the compressor on the day.
A Nurse Decorated, a Director Replaced
It did settle one thing. On Sunday, August 30, Sharif approved the Sitara-i-Khidmat, one of Pakistan’s civil honors, and a 10 million rupee award for Razia Noreen, the nurse who carried the only surviving newborn out of the ward. The committee found she entered the nursery and came out eight seconds later with the baby. “I did not do it for a reward,” Noreen told the Associated Press. “I love children, and caring for them is my passion.” The same finding pushed back on accounts that staff had fled: CCTV, the committee said, does not support a general finding that frontline clinical staff abandoned the newborns.
Also on August 30, Dr. Muhammad Salman, chief executive of the National Institutes of Health, took charge as PIMS executive director on a three-year deputation. The federal government announced 5 million rupees in compensation for each family on August 27, and on August 28 the health ministry ordered every public-sector hospital under its control to begin a fire-safety audit.
PIMS is where people across the region who cannot afford private care go. Parents who came on Wednesday to visit babies born within the past few days left with paperwork and a body to carry home. Eight suspensions and an order to prosecute have followed in three days. What has not followed is an answer to how the fire began. The committee’s full report is due within days — and with it, whatever the alarms and sprinklers it found missing at PIMS mean for the wards where the youngest patients sleep.
