A fire in the newborn nursery of Pakistan’s largest public hospital in Islamabad killed at least 14 babies early on Wednesday. One infant was rescued.
The blaze began at around 6.45am in the nursery on the third floor of the mother and child health ward at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences. Rescue officials said it appears to have started when the compressor of an air-conditioning unit exploded inside the nursery.
Reported death tolls vary. Hospital officials and the government put the figure at 14; police told CNN at least 13 children had died, mostly newborns; the broadcaster Geo TV and several agencies reported 15. Officials said 15 or 16 newborns were in the nursery when the fire broke out and that some survivors were in a critical condition, so the toll may change. Islamabad’s chief commissioner, Sohail Ashraf, said an emergency call came in just before 7am.
Outside the hospital, a father told reporters his three-day-old baby had been killed, saying no one could understand the pain he was going through. A woman named Muneeba described escaping with her nephew and sister-in-law as the fire spread.
From Plain Sight News
Why newborn units are so vulnerable
Fires in neonatal wards recur across South Asia with a regularity that is itself the story. There are structural reasons, and they are worth setting out because they point to what prevention would require.
Newborn units concentrate several risks in one room. Incubators and warmers draw continuous power, often through wiring installed decades earlier and extended repeatedly as capacity grew. Supplemental oxygen is in use, and oxygen makes fires burn far more fiercely. Air-conditioning is essential for temperature control and adds another load.
Evacuation is the other half of the problem. A patient in a neonatal unit cannot walk, cannot be carried several at a time, and in many cases cannot be separated from equipment without immediate risk. Even a well-drilled staff can move only a few infants per person, and smoke reaches a small body faster than an adult one.
That combination means the margin between a contained electrical fault and a mass-casualty event is measured in minutes.
The pattern in the region
Similar fires have occurred repeatedly. Ten newborns died in a neonatal intensive care unit in Jhansi, in northern India, in November 2024, with the toll later rising; parents there said fire alarms did not sound. Six newborns died in a Delhi children’s hospital fire in May 2024. A fire destroyed medicine stocks at a children’s hospital in Lahore in 2022. Earlier this year a shopping centre fire in Karachi killed at least 67 people.
Reporting on Wednesday’s fire noted that Pakistani government hospitals are subsidised but under-resourced and overburdened, often running on outdated electrical systems, and that watchdogs have raised concerns about them before. Islamabad’s facilities are generally better than those elsewhere in the country, which is part of why the fire has landed as it has.
From Plain Sight News
What an inquiry would need to establish
Investigations into hospital fires tend to turn on a small number of questions, and they are the ones to watch for in the coming weeks rather than the initial statements.
Whether fire detection was installed and whether it worked. Whether the ward had compartmentation — fire-resisting doors and walls that slow smoke spread and buy evacuation time. Whether the electrical load on the circuit matched what it was designed for. Whether staff had drilled for evacuating non-ambulatory patients. And whether previous inspections had flagged any of it.
None of that is answerable today, and initial explanations offered in the hours after a fire are frequently revised. What can be said is that the cause reported so far — an air-conditioning compressor — is the kind of single-component failure that safe buildings are designed to survive.
We have reported the circumstances of this fire without describing the deaths of the children involved. Our approach to reporting on victims is set out in our editorial standards.
From Plain Sight News
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