A fire caused by a short circuit in the air-conditioning unit of the neonatal intensive care nursery at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Islamabad's largest public hospital, killed at least 14 newborns early Wednesday, according to Al Jazeera's reporting based on accounts from relatives and hospital management, corroborated by Pakistan's Dawn newspaper. The nursery, which held 15 infants at the time, was located on the third floor of the hospital's older maternity wing. Only one newborn was rescued alive.

According to Al Jazeera, the fire broke out around 6:30am local time. Arif Rana, 46, was asleep on the lawn outside the maternity unit when he got a call that a fire had started in the ward where his sister, who had given birth the day before, was staying. He ran barefoot into the building and found the third-floor corridors dark and suffocating.

"It was hot, and I could hear so much yelling and panicked shouts, and I couldn't even see due to darkness," Rana told the reporter. "The smoke made it hard to breathe."

Pakistan and Brazil have few direct diplomatic ties, but the tragedy revives a debate familiar to hospitals worldwide over fire safety and blocked emergency exits, a subject Brazil knows well since the 2013 Kiss nightclub fire in Santa Maria, in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where locked doors turned the venue into a trap and killed 242 people. In Islamabad, witnesses told Al Jazeera that the ward's emergency exits were blocked from inside, though a hospital official told the BBC the door was not locked but was staffed by security guards. Several people at the hospital also said renovation work had been under way somewhere inside the building in recent weeks, though no one could say exactly where or what it involved.

Smoke, screams and a scramble to rescue

Emergency crews took roughly ten minutes to reach the scene after the first call came in around 6:45am, according to the Islamabad district administration. A firefighter from Rescue 1122, the government's ambulance and fire service, who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to media, said his team had to break through a concrete grille and then a window to reach people trapped inside. Kamran Riaz, whose niece was among the victims, said the baby girl, born just three days earlier and admitted for breathing problems, was among the 14 who died. "We have no clarity on what is going on," Riaz said, as his brother submitted a DNA sample at the hospital morgue nearby.

Second similar tragedy in two years

Multiple Pakistani outlets reported that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered an investigation and removed Federal Health Secretary Aslam Ghouri from his post following the fire. It is not the first time a hospital air-conditioning fault has killed newborns in the country: in June 2024, a similar fire at Sahiwal Teaching Hospital in Punjab province killed 11 babies. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz at the time ordered the arrest of the hospital's medical superintendent and three senior doctors after investigators found the facility's fire extinguishers had expired.

Islamabad's district magistrate opened a probe into Wednesday's fire, with a preliminary report due within 24 hours, according to Dawn. Grieving families remained outside the hospital throughout the day, demanding answers over the apparent absence of nursery staff when the fire broke out and over the ward having only one usable exit.