Locked inside: Grief and anger as Pakistan hospital fire kills 14 newborns
Islamabad, Pakistan — It was 6:30am on Wednesday when Arif Rana, 46, woke to a phone call. He had been asleep on the lawn outside the maternity unit of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Islamabad’s largest public-sector hospital.
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Key Facts
- Fact 1: Islamabad, Pakistan — It was 6:30am on Wednesday when Arif Rana, 46, woke to a phone call.
- Fact 2: Rana and his 20-year-old son, who was also with him at the hospital, rushed into the ward barefoot.
- Fact 3: “It was only due to her [the sister-in-law’s] courage and bravery that my sister, her newborn survived, otherwise, they too could have died in there,” he said quietly, just as 14 other newborns had, in the hospital’s critical care nursery down the corridor.
- Fact 4: Arif Rana (right) sitting outside the maternity ward at PIMS on Wednesday, August 26, 2026 [Abid Hussain/Al Jazeera]According to hospital management, the fire was caused by a short circuit in the nursery’s air-conditioning unit.
Islamabad, Pakistan — It was 6:30am on Wednesday when Arif Rana, 46, woke to a phone call. He had been asleep on the lawn outside the maternity unit of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Islamabad’s largest public-sector hospital.
“My sister gave birth to a baby girl on Tuesday, and she was admitted in the general ward of the hospital. The call came from her husband’s sister, who was attending to my sister, yelling and asking me to come up as a fire had erupted inside the ward,” he told Al Jazeera. Rana and his 20-year-old son, who was also with him at the hospital, rushed into the ward barefoot.
(Original synthesis pending human/AI review — generated by the stub provider by selecting real sentences from the source material, not by writing new analysis or commentary.)
Original source: Al Jazeera
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