Fourteen newborn babies died on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, when fire swept the nursery of the largest government hospital in Pakistan’s capital, a blaze that rescue officials traced to an air-conditioning compressor that exploded inside the room where the infants were being cared for.
At least 15 newborns were inside the nursery at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad when the fire began about 6:45 a.m., hospital officials said. One baby was pulled out alive. Federal Health Minister Mustafa Kamal confirmed that 14 babies died.
The flames stayed inside the nursery, part of the hospital’s gynecology ward, and reached no other section of the sprawling public facility. Crews knocked the fire down soon after arriving and then began cooling the site, according to local media reports. Security personnel took up positions outside the Mother and Child Health (MCH) ward, where ambulances lined up as word spread and families rushed in.
Grief and Anger Outside the Ward
Police were deployed at the hospital. Parents, grandparents and other relatives pressed toward the maternity building, some collapsing in tears, others shouting for accountability and asking a question no official could yet answer: how a nursery full of the most fragile patients in the building came to burn.
“The scene is unbearable in the ward,” Noreen Khan, a senior nurse at PIMS, told CBS News by telephone. The infants who were lost, she said, had been alive for barely a day or two.
Amir Abbasi lost a newborn nephew in the fire — the first boy born into his family in years, he said — and recalled touching the baby’s face and holding his hand only a day earlier. Nearby, a mother sobbed outside the hospital and demanded that her child be given back to her, saying she wanted justice.
Mohammad Sami, who had delivered three days before, said her infant had been under intensive care inside the nursery at the moment the flames broke out. She had no words, she said, and no one to blame; all she knew was that her child was gone. According to Sami, hospital staff told the relatives that the bodies would be released once the necessary documentation was completed.
Not every family in the building that morning suffered the same loss. Muneeba, who was at the hospital visiting relatives, said she made it out along with her nephew and her sister-in-law. “Thank God our baby is safe,” she told CNN. Another father, standing outside the hospital, told reporters his three-day-old baby had been killed and said no one could understand the pain he was carrying.
An Inquiry Ordered Within 24 Hours
The Islamabad district magistrate appointed a multiagency fact-finding committee and directed it to deliver a report within 24 hours, according to a government notification. The panel was instructed to determine what caused the fire and how it spread, to establish whether adequate fire-safety measures were in place in the nursery, and to assess how the emergency response was handled.
Those are precisely the questions families were shouting at the hospital gates. Relatives said they wanted to know whether the nursery had working firefighting equipment, and why an air-conditioning unit in a room of newborns had been allowed to fail so catastrophically.
Kamal, the health minister, said he was flying in from Karachi to the capital to supervise the inquiry himself, telling Pakistan’s Geo News that the health director-general and the federal health secretary had already reached PIMS. Officials were in contact with the affected families, he said, adding that the first task was to support the parents and return their babies to them.
Shock Ripples Across Pakistan
The deaths sent a wave of grief far beyond the hospital compound. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered an immediate investigation and expressed sorrow, saying a tragedy that claims children is a loss that cannot be repaired. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi also voiced sorrow over the fire.
President Asif Ali Zardari offered condolences to the families and described the deaths as heartbreaking and impossible to make good. He demanded that whoever was at fault be named and prosecuted, and pressed hospitals across the country to put effective fire-safety measures and emergency procedures in place, singling out wards that care for newborns.
PIMS is the largest government-run hospital in Islamabad, drawing patients from across the region who cannot afford private care. Its maternity building, where the fire broke out, delivers and treats infants around the clock.
For the parents who arrived on Wednesday to visit babies born within the past few days, the outcome was reduced to paperwork and a body to carry home. What the fact-finding committee concludes about the compressor, the alarms and the response will determine whether anyone is held responsible — and whether the safeguards Zardari demanded ever reach the wards where the youngest patients sleep.
