Fire swept the nursery of the largest government hospital in Pakistan’s capital on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, killing 14 newborn babies in the room where they were being cared for — a blaze the hospital now attributes, in a preliminary report, to a blast involving a nebulizer.

The nursery of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in Islamabad held at least 15 newborns when the fire broke out; the first emergency call went out about 6:45 a.m., the Islamabad district administration said. One baby was pulled out alive. Federal Health Minister Mustafa Kamal confirmed that 14 babies died.

Two doctors, two nurses and other staff were on duty in the third-floor nursery, but the flames moved so fast that they managed to rescue only one baby of the 15 there, hospital officials said in an account reported on Thursday, August 27.

No other section of the sprawling public facility was touched: the flames stayed inside the nursery, which is part of the hospital’s gynecology ward. Local media reports said crews knocked the fire down soon after arriving and then began cooling the site. Security personnel took up positions outside the Mother and Child Health (MCH) ward. Word of the fire spread quickly, families rushed in, and a line of ambulances formed.

Grief and Anger Outside the Ward

Parents, grandparents and other relatives pressed toward the maternity building as police were deployed at the hospital. Some collapsed in tears. Others shouted for accountability and put to officials a question none could yet answer: what had set alight a room holding the building’s frailest patients.

“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 known, she said in the call.

Amir Abbasi said the newborn nephew he lost in the fire was the first boy born into his family in years, and he recalled touching the baby’s face and holding his hand only a day earlier. Justice was what one mother nearby said she wanted, weeping in front of the hospital as she called on staff to return her child to her.

Her infant had been under intensive care inside the nursery at the moment the flames broke out, said a woman The Associated Press identified as Mrs. Mohammad Sami, who had given birth three days before. Language failed her and there was no one she could hold responsible, she said; the single fact she had was that her child was gone.

The same morning brought a different outcome for some families in the building. Muneeba, who was at the hospital visiting relatives, said she got out along with her nephew and her sister-in-law. “Thank God our baby is safe,” she told CNN. Another father, speaking to reporters outside the hospital, said his baby, three days old, was among the dead, and that the pain he was carrying was beyond anyone’s understanding.

Inquiries Ordered and a Health Secretary Removed

A government notification showed the Islamabad district magistrate appointed a multiagency fact-finding committee with 24 hours to deliver a report. Its instructions: establish what caused the fire and how it spread, determine whether adequate fire-safety measures were in place in the nursery, and assess how the emergency response was handled.

Families at the hospital gates were shouting those same questions. Whether firefighting equipment in the nursery had been in working order was one thing relatives said they wanted answered; the other was how an air-conditioning unit had been permitted to fail so catastrophically in a room full of newborns.

Supervision of the inquiry would be his own job, said Kamal, the health minister, who added that he was flying in from Karachi to the capital. The health director-general and the federal health secretary had already reached PIMS, he told Pakistan’s Geo News. Contact had been established with the affected families, he said, and supporting the parents and returning their babies to them was the first task.

Wednesday brought a further step from Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. He suspended Federal Health Secretary Aslam Ghauri and constituted a separate high-level inquiry committee under former interior secretary Shahid Khan, due to submit an interim report within 48 hours and a final report within five days.

That committee visited the third-floor nursery on Thursday, August 27, and was expected to take statements from hospital staff, witnesses and families.

Emergency exits at the ward were permanently closed and evacuation routes obstructed, a Capital Development Authority fire brigade report found, and it said firefighters were impeded by hospital security staff as the response began — an echo of the locked doors relatives described at the gates. PIMS rejected that account, saying all emergency exits were open and functional during the fire and that staff used 35 fire extinguishers and other safety equipment against the blaze.

In its own preliminary report, the hospital now says a blast involving a nebulizer sparked the fire, which spread within minutes because of the high concentration of oxygen in the nursery, where each incubator had oxygen points. That marks a change from the account given by hospital and district officials that an exploding air-conditioning unit caused it. The report put the first spark inside the nursery at about 6:38 a.m. and said the infants were killed by burns and the loss of their oxygen supply. The prime minister’s committee has not reached its own conclusion and will independently determine the cause, the city administration said.

Authorities handed over the bodies of all 14 newborns to their families overnight into Thursday, August 27. The babies were buried in their families’ home towns that day.

Shock Ripples Across Pakistan

Grief over the deaths spread far beyond the hospital compound. An immediate investigation was ordered by Sharif, who expressed sorrow and said a tragedy that claims children is a loss that cannot be repaired. Sorrow over the fire was voiced too by Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi.

Condolences came as well from President Asif Ali Zardari, who described the deaths as heartbreaking and impossible to make good. Whoever was at fault should be named and prosecuted, he demanded, and he called on hospitals nationwide to install effective fire-safety measures and emergency procedures, with particular attention to the wards where newborns are cared for.

Patients who cannot afford private care come from across the region to PIMS, the largest government-run hospital in Islamabad. Its maternity building, where the fire broke out, delivers and treats infants around the clock.

By Thursday, August 27, the mood at the hospital was somber, with doctors, staff, patients and relatives mourning the newborns and access restricted to the third-floor fire area. A vigil was held for the 14 newborns, whose bodies were handed to their families overnight and who were buried the same day in their families’ home towns.

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. Whether anyone is held responsible now rests on what the inquiries conclude about the cause, the alarms and the response — and on whether the safeguards Zardari demanded ever reach the wards where the youngest patients sleep.