KARACHI: While police on Saturday arrested an accountant of a private hospital on a charge of unintentional murder a day after the death of four children at the health facility, a preliminary investigation report of the health department blamed the deficient and unprofessional staff and their mishandling for the tragedy.

“We have received a preliminary report by the three-member team constituted to conduct an inquiry into the cause of deaths of four infants — three girls and a boy — in Shah National Children Hospital on Friday,” said Dr Zafar Ijaz, executive district officer, health, Karachi while speaking to Dawn.

He made it clear that the report was not the final word on the incident.

“It is a preliminary inquiry to initially determine the cause of deaths. The team pored over documents apart from questioning certain relevant people and concludes that a deficient number of doctors and paramedics were present in the facility,” he said.

Accountant arrested for unintentional murder

Syed Hussain Ahmed, the Korangi town health officer who was a member of the inquiry committee, said they found oxygen in incubators and that ventilators of the hospital were properly working and that there were no power outages. A large generator was too put in place as a stopgap arrangement in case of any power breakdown.

He said senior doctors of the hospital were absent and their orders, if any, to the paramedics had not been properly followed because of the latter’s untrained background, which caused the children to become unstable and four of them died.

Another official said the staff failed to keep their nerves when they saw children collapsing. “They panicked, instead of trying to get them to become stable with dexterity.”

Dr Ahmed said the report initially held the doctors and their supporting staff responsible. However, he added, it required a detailed inquiry to fix responsibility for wrongdoing.

The officials hinted that the facility had already been sealed off by the police — more because of violent protests that destroyed almost everything in the hospital — which hindered the inquiry team to properly inspect it within a day.

“There is still a lot to do for them to do a comprehensive inquiry,” he said.

As the hospital was closed and police were on the lookout for the owners, most of the staff vanished and were unavailable for interviews by the investigators.

The parents were busy burying their children and were unavailable to shed light on what had actually happened.

What has made the inquiry more complicated was parents’ refusal to allow the post-mortem examination of the children, which, the officials believed, would have helped a lot to find out about the actual cause or causes of their deaths.

Meanwhile, the Korangi Industrial Area police arrested the accountant, Ramzan Shah, who is also the brother of one of the hospital owners, Tariq Shah, said sub-divisional police officer DSP Raheem Shah.

The officer added that the police had registered an FIR against two hospital owners, Tariq Shah and Adnan Bashir, and the accountant Ramzan Shah, on a complaint of the father of one of the deceased children under Section 322 (unintentional murder) and 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code.

Efforts were on for the arrest of the other suspects, he said.

The private hospital — Shah National Children Hospital — near the Korangi crossing area had been sealed off on Friday following the deaths in mysterious circumstances that infuriated their relatives and residents who ransacked it in a fit of anger and fury and staged a violent protest on the main road.

The children — three girls, Shaista, Varsha and Saamia, and a boy, Nasir, — aged between five days and five months.

The various reasons for the deaths narrated by hospital staff and some people who had gathered there were power failure, depleted oxygen facility and administration of wrong or expired medicines.

“Apart from the arrest of one of the suspects, the police investigators have been interviewing hospital staff to find a clue to the owners’ whereabouts,” the DSP said.

Published in Dawn, June 8th, 2014