By Phil Stewart and Steve Gorman
WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump has ordered the use of a firing squad to execute the former US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in a 2009 shooting spree the gunman later described as retaliation for US wars in the Muslim world, the Pentagon said on Monday.
Putting former US Army Major Nidal Hasan to death by Army firing squad was approved by Trump at the recommendation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said on X.
Parnell noted that Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” — God is greatest in Arabic — during the attack, which killed 12 unarmed active-duty soldiers and a retired serviceman, and wounded 32 others.
The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution, Parnell said, adding, “Judgment day for Hasan has finally come.”
Death by firing squad was one of several forms of capital punishment the Trump administration recently added to permissible forms of execution for the gravest of federal crimes, along with electrocution and gas asphyxiation.
The number of federal execution options was expanded in part because of increasing difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections, which have also proved challenging to carry out for other reasons at times.
Plans by the state of Tennessee to execute a woman for the first time in more than 200 years went awry last week when prison personnel botched an attempt to administer a lethal injection, leaving the death-row inmate, Christa Pike, alive but unconscious and hospitalized on life support.
Pike’s lawyers had previously urged that the Tennessee Department of Correction to consider an alternative to lethal injection, such as hanging or firing squad, in anticipation of the trouble executioners faced in establishing a sound intravenous line.
A military jury sentenced Hasan to death in August 2013, after finding him guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder for opening fire with a laser-sighted handgun in a medical facility at the sprawling central Texas military base.
The shooting came weeks before Hasan, now 56, was scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan. He was left partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair from being shot by police upon his arrest.
In a statement responding to Trump’s decision, the group Death Penalty Action, which opposes capital punishment, said: “There is nothing Donald Trump loves more than the power to kill.”
Military executions are rare, and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice a death sentence imposed by court-martial may not be carried out “until approved by the president.”
If Hasan is put to death, it would mark the first military execution since 1961, the group said. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the 1961 execution was carried out by hanging. The apparent last known execution by a US military firing squad was one carried out “by musketry” in November 1945, the center reported.
At least five states have firing squads on the books, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. In 2025, South Carolina carried out the first such execution in the United States in 15 years.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
Comments