Pakistan hospital fire: Report finds no fire alarms or sprinklers at neonatal unit where fire killed 14

Several people described chaos and confusion in the hospital.

“There should have been fire extinguishers and protocols, but no one was doing anything,” Walid said. “Everyone was just running.”

Ghafoor said that he was part of a group of seven or eight who tried to find a way to relieve the thick smoke; they managed to break glass panels at the end of the corridor before firefighters arrived.

The emergency services weren’t notified about the fire until 06:54, the report says, nearly 20 minutes after it first began. It says the first rescue workers arrived at 07:01.

Like the firefighter who spoke to the BBC, Ghafoor also said rescue staff struggled to get through some of the hospital’s doors.

At the time, the hospital’s executive director had told BBC News that the door to the newborns’ ward was not locked, but guarded, because of previous incidents of baby abductions from government hospitals.

The report says that while “ordinary access restrictions may be legitimate for security purposes… they cannot render designated emergency routes inaccessible when needed.”

The report also found that the hospital had received previous warnings about fire risks. A month before, a fire had broken out at its nursing hostel, raising issues with smoke detection, alarms and general fire preparedness.

It says that the hospital and its senior management “bear the principal institutional responsibility for failing to convert known risks, prior warnings and assigned duties into an effective safety system”.

Pakistan’s prime minister has directed the inquiry’s short-term measures to be implemented within the next three months and ordered fire safety audits of public and private offices and buildings.

He has also suspended eight officials and asked for criminal proceedings to be initiated against them.