Islamabad, Pakistan – Staff nurse Razia Noreen was at a medicine cupboard on the nursery ward of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), Islamabad’s largest public-sector hospital. She was two doors from the babies in her care, preparing the morning’s injections. As she shut the cupboard door, she saw through the nursery’s glass panel a light too sharp and too red to be anything ordinary.
She did not wait to understand what it was. It was 6:38am on Wednesday, August 26. Elsewhere in the ward, her colleague, Sister Nasreen, was already running out, shouting for help.
At 56 seconds past 6:38am, according to security camera timestamps later logged by a government inquiry committee, Noreen rushed into the nursery. Eight seconds later, she emerged carrying a baby. By 6:40am, the room was gone, swallowed by smoke so thick that the security cameras could no longer see through it.
Noreen was recalling this eight days later, in a plain office beside the hostel warden’s room at PIMS, dressed in a pale pink shalwar kameez, her dupatta loose over one shoulder. The baby Noreen carried out was the only one who lived. On Thursday, Noreen was given an award by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif for her courage.
But for the nurse, the trauma of that Wednesday morning was still raw. Barely two hours after meeting the prime minister, she sat down and talked, at length, about what happened inside. Noreen had been on duty since 8pm the previous night, working a routine dawn medication round with Sister Nasreen, with less than two hours left before the end of her shift.
When she saw the light through the nursery glass, she says she did not stop to work out what it was. I didn’t think about what would happen next.” Noreen said the fire was coming out of the side of the air-conditioning unit facing her. That’s just what I saw.” The government’s interim inquiry, submitted on August 28, states that the precise cause of the fire “is not yet conclusively established”, with evidence pointing variously to the air conditioner, an incubator or an electrical short circuit.
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