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

Published On 5 Sep 20265 Sep 2026.

Key points

• 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.
• Noreen, 38, has spent 21 years in administration nursing, the last 17 of them at PIMS.
• At 56 seconds past 6: 38am, according to security camera timestamps afterwards logged by a administration inquiry committee, Noreen rushed into the nursery.
• On Thursday, Noreen was given an award by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif for her courage.
• Her mother, 83, a retired administration school teacher who is hard of hearing, lives in Lahore with one of Noreen's brothers.

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 support.

Eight seconds afterwards, she emerged carrying a baby. She tried to go back in. She could not. 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 afterwards, 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.

"There was a proper blast, " she informed Al Jazeera. "Everything turned to smoke."

Fifteen newborns had been in that nursery. Fourteen died. 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 session the prime minister, she sat down and talked, at length, concerning 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 notes she did not stop to work out what it was.

"I just told my sister nurse, save the babies, " she informed Al Jazeera. "I went in. I didn't think regarding what would happen next."

Noreen remarked the fire was coming out of the side of the air-conditioning unit facing her.

"The AC was right in front of me, and the fire was coming out of its side, " she remarked. "We don't know what was happening behind it. That's just what I saw."

In practice, 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.

Inside the nursery, Noreen reached the nearest baby. There was no time to choose between 15. She carried the infant out and handed her to Dr Abdul Rehman, a doctor who had been inserting a feeding tube in the next room and emerged into the corridor moments after her. Then she turned back.

"I thought I'd get five, six, seven, eight more of them out, " she remarked. "But the fire was moving faster than I was."

Notably, a second doctor, Dr Rimsha. This person had been doing rounds nearby and saw the same light Noreen had, followed her in.

For context, the two of them, and afterwards Sister Nasreen, tried to crawl back through the smoke below the worst of the heat. A sudden loss of power plunged the room into darkness. They could not obtain through.

Noreen's phone, left behind on the medication table when she ran in, sat inside the burned ward overnight. Hospital guards discovered it and returned it to her the next afternoon. Its case is still scorched and cracked.

Noreen, Dr Rimsha and Sister Nasreen instead moved to where a separate rescue team was lowering babies from an adjoining gynaecology ward. They stood there catching newborns and running them to the neonatal intensive care unit until the smoke became too thick to remain.

For context, the government's inquiry afterwards identified that the available evidence "does not support generalised allegations that front-line medical and nursing staff simply abandoned the newborns".

Ask Noreen what a nurse is to a newborn separated from its mother, and she has one answer: its first mother.

"A mother who gives birth endures a pain no one else can stand in for, " she remarked. "But once a baby is in our hands, no one else is watching over it the way we are, checking their oxygen, their feeding, whether they're breathing right, every two hours, whatever else is happening around us. That is why we are their first mother." 'I am particularly happy with the children'.

Noreen, 38, has spent 21 years in administration nursing, the last 17 of them at PIMS. She trained in Karachi right after school, at the age of 17, before a transfer brought her to PIMS in 2009. She has never married.

When asked concerning it directly, "Thank God, I am very happy with the children, " she remarked.

Born in Punjab's city of Sahiwal, she was one of seven children. Her father, Victor John, was a pastor; he died when she was in the eighth grade. Two of her sisters have died; a third, additionally a nurse, lives in Lahore.

Noreen herself has lived in the PIMS staff hostel, throughout from the ward where she works, for most of the past two decades.

With her own phone trapped inside the burning ward, Noreen could not call her family herself.

Noreen's niece happened to be staying with her that week. It was the niece the warden discovered, and who secured word to the family in Lahore: Noreen was safe. 'It's always the two of us'.

On the morning of the fire, Noreen and Sister Nasreen were the only two nurses on duty in a nursery holding 15 babies, backed by two doctors, one of them two rooms away. She notes it was not an unusual night.

"Sometimes there are 20 babies, sometimes 25, " she remarked. "It's always the two of us."

Doctors on her ward work 36-hour shifts, she remarked, arriving at 8am and going off duty at 2pm the after day.

Handover between nursing shifts, checking each baby's medication, feeding and vital signs, takes roughly 45 minutes given the numbers involved. The cost of drugs can additionally run to tens of thousands of Pakistani rupees per injection, all provided by PIMS to its patients.

"Sometimes we get a break, sometimes we don't, " she remarked. "When the workload is heavy, even the water we carry with us goes back home untouched."

No fire drill had been run in the nursery before August 26, not even after an earlier fire at a nearby PIMS hostel in July.

Asked what is required after an incident like this, she does not hesitate.

Taken together, the developments around 'I could not save the rest': Hero nurse remembers Pakistan's nursery fire point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.