Trump approves firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter, Pentagon says

The 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, for which Nidal Hasan was convicted, killed 13 US soldiers. Photograph: Tony Gutierrez/APView image in fullscreenThe 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, for which Nidal Hasan was convicted, killed 13 US soldiers. Photograph: Tony Gutierrez/APTrump approves firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter, Pentagon saysNidal Hasan sentenced to death by military jury in 2013 for carrying out deadly shooting attack at army base in Texas

Donald Trump has approved the execution by US army firing squad of Nidal Hasan, who was sentenced to death for killing 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a social media post.

Hasan, who was an army psychiatrist, would become first US soldier to be executed by the US military in more than 60 years.

Parnell said in a post on X that defense 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”.

He added: “The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution. Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”

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

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

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

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

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

Although US mass shootings are disturbingly common, they are rare at military facilities.

In 2025, a soldier opened fire at a US military base in the state of 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.