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A blaze that swept through a maternity ward at one of Islamabad's biggest state-run hospitals has killed 14 newborn babies, and anguished parents are demanding to know why it took hours for anyone to reach their children.
The fire erupted shortly after dawn on Wednesday in an air-conditioning unit on the third floor of the mother-and-child wing of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), a flagship public hospital in the capital. Fifteen infants were in the ward when the flames spread. Only one of them survived.
Hivsa Walid was nearby with her sister-in-law, who had delivered her own child just days before. At first she assumed a shout she heard meant a patient had passed away — then she spotted the smoke. The two women snatched up the unnamed baby girl and ran downstairs without pausing to collect any belongings. Some of the mothers on the ward, she recalled, had given birth only hours earlier, and the descent remains a blur in her memory.
Other families described an agonizing wait for help that never seemed to come. Khurram Mehmood, 40, whose three-day-old daughter died in the blaze, told AFP news agency that rescuers were conspicuously slow to appear. Jaweria, who also lost her newborn, said access to the ward was blocked because the entrance was shut. She wept for two hours, she said, and officers only showed up four hours later — saying they were there to investigate. Her question cut through the grief: how could medical staff have abandoned the babies inside?
Hospital authorities pushed back against that account. Rana Imran Sikander, PIMS executive director, told the BBC the ward's door was never locked but was instead kept under supervision. He explained that constant staffing of the entrance was meant to prevent infant abductions, which have occurred previously at government-run facilities in Pakistan.
Witnesses, however, painted a picture of chaos and neglect. One father said he had visited the ward daily for eight days and saw no fire safety measures or usable escape routes, with every door except the visitors' entrance kept closed — a policy, he believed, designed to stop parents lingering too often at their children's bedsides. Multiple people said duty personnel were nowhere to be found when the fire started. According to another witness quoted by AFP, relatives had to force their way through a door themselves while firefighters shattered windows in an effort to tame the flames.
Abdul Ghafoor, who attempted to enter the burning building, said he could not get anywhere near the maternity section because dense black smoke had filled the corridors with patients still trapped inside. By his estimate, rescue crews did not arrive until nearly two hours had passed. That account clashes sharply with the official version: Islamabad's chief commissioner, Sohail Ashraf, insisted that teams were dispatched and reached the site immediately after the first emergency call.
PIMS houses 156 beds in its maternal and child health division, making the apparent absence of functioning fire protocols all the more striking. The disaster fits a grim national pattern: weak safety regulations, poorly enforced building codes, and repeated failures of oversight have amplified death tolls in Pakistani fires. In January, survivors of a shopping mall fire in Karachi that killed dozens said locked exits had likely trapped many of the victims — an accusation hauntingly similar to the claims emerging from Islamabad this week.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif voiced profound sorrow over the deaths and ordered an immediate inquiry, according to a statement from his office. In a sign of accountability efforts already underway, he suspended Aslam Ghauri, the federal health secretary, one of the country's most senior health officials. The statement described what happened to the children as an irreversible loss — words that will offer little comfort to parents who spent their last hours outside a burning ward, listening and waiting.
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