Trump approves firing squad for convicted US military base shooter

President Donald Trump has approved the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a United States Army psychiatrist who shot dead 13 people at a military base in 2009, the Pentagon said on Monday.

Hasan’s execution for the attack at Fort Hood in Texas – which also wounded more than two dozen people – will be the first carried out by the US military since 1961.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth “has recommended – and President Donald J. Trump has approved – death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a post on X.

“The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution. Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell wrote.

Hasan was sentenced to death by a military jury in 2013 for carrying out the al-Qaeda-inspired mass shooting at Fort Hood.

He chose to conduct his own defence during the trial but called no witnesses, gave no testimony and made no attempt to deny the charges. Court-appointed defence attorneys expressed concern that he was seeking execution.

Base shootings rare

Hasan, a US-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, opened fire on November 5, 2009, at a medical facility in the sprawling Fort Hood base, which served as a staging point for soldiers deploying to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Twelve of the dead and 30 of the wounded were soldiers. Hasan was shot and partially paralysed by a civilian police officer who responded to the attack.

The court that convicted Hasan was told he opposed the US military’s occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he had spoken online with an alleged al-Qaeda figure, radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen subsequently killed in a US drone strike in Yemen.

While mass shootings in the United States are common, they are rare at military facilities.

In 2025, a soldier opened fire at a US military base in Georgia, wounding five fellow troops before he was tackled and apprehended.

In 2019, a US sailor fatally shot two people and wounded a third at a base in Hawaii, while a Saudi military student shot dead three people at a military facility in Florida the same year.

A Kuwaiti-born US citizen attacked two military installations in Tennessee in 2015, killing four Marines and a sailor. The FBI concluded the violence was inspired by a “foreign terrorist group”.

Two years earlier, a man killed 12 people and wounded eight at the Washington Navy Yard in the US capital, before being shot dead by officers.

- AFP