SIALKOT: Hundreds of indoor and outdoors patients, their attendants, besides doctors and paramedics, had to be evacuated from the building of Allama Iqbal Memorial Teaching Hospital here after a massive fire broke out in the facility’s luggage store on Thursday.

According to hospital staff and Rescue 1122 officials, the fire erupted due to electric short circuit in the store and soon engulfed adjacent family and medical wards.

They said soon the smoke filled in the whole building causing panic among the patients, their attendants, doctors and paramedics.

As every one was in a hurry to leave the building, it caused a stampede-like situation in the hospital, rescuers said.

The most vulnerable were critical patients, children and newborns, they added.

“We have shifted as many as eight newborns who were in incubators to the Sardar Begum Memorial Teaching Hospital, as their condition became critical due to the smoke which spread everywhere,” a rescuer said.

The firefighters of the Rescue 1122 extinguished the fire after an hour-long struggle with the help of two fire-engines.

The rescuers shifted all the patients to the lawns of the hospital where they had to spend several hours in the hot and humid weather. Because of the fire, electric supply to the hospital remained suspended for about five hours as there was no alternative power arrangement there.

However, no casualty was reported during the whole episode.

Hospital management claimed that all the record of the patients (from 2013 to June 2017) and items, including beds, mattresses, bedsheets, medical and surgical equipment were gutted in the inferno.

Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2017