‘I could not save the rest’: Hero nurse remembers Pakistan’s nursery fire

Razia Noreen saw a sharp red light through the glass panel of the nursery and ran toward the babies. Eight seconds after entering, she emerged carrying the only newborn to survive a fire that killed the other 14.

The staff nurse had been preparing morning injections at Islamabad’s Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences when the fire broke out at 6:38am on August 26. Security camera timestamps reviewed by a government inquiry showed her entering the nursery 56 seconds after the hour. She tried to go back inside, but smoke quickly overwhelmed the room. By 6:40am, the cameras could no longer see through it.

“There was a proper blast,” Noreen told Al Jazeera. “Everything turned to smoke.” She had been working since 8pm the previous evening, with less than two hours left in her shift, when she noticed the light. She said she told her colleague, Sister Nasreen, to save the babies before entering without stopping to consider the danger.

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There was a proper blast. Everything turned to smoke.

Noreen said the flames came from the side of the air-conditioning unit facing her. The government’s interim inquiry, submitted on August 28, said the precise cause remained “not yet conclusively established”, with evidence pointing to the air conditioner, an incubator or an electrical short circuit. Rescue workers later broke through a concrete grill and a window to reach the ward.

A week after the fire, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif presented Noreen with an award for courage. But when she spoke at the hospital shortly afterward, she was still recounting the screams and the babies she could not bring out. The newborn she carried away was the sole survivor.

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Save the babies.