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.“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. They encountered smoke billowing from the building. As they climbed to the third floor, they found the corridors pitch-black and suffocatingly hot.“It was hot, and I could hear so much yelling and panicked shouts, and I couldn’t even see due to darkness,” Rana recalled, sitting outside the ward hours after the incident. “The smoke made it hard to breathe.”He found his sister’s mother-in-law inside the ward and took her to safety. Outside, he found his sister and her newborn, who had been rescued by his sister-in-law.“It was only due to her [the sister-in-law’s] courage and br...