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

President Donald Trump has authorized the use of a firing squad to execute Nidal Hasan, a former army psychiatrist convicted of murdering 13 soldiers at the Fort Hood base in Texas in 2009. The Pentagon confirmed the decision in a statement from chief spokesperson Sean Parnell. This would mark the first execution of a US soldier by the US military in over six decades.

As an army psychiatrist, Hasan was sentenced to death by a military jury in 2013 for the mass shooting at Fort Hood. He represented himself during the trial, providing no testimony and making no attempt to deny the charges. Prosecutors argued that Hasan opposed the US military's presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and had communicated online with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen.

Since the 2009 attack, there have been rare mass shootings at military bases in the US, including a 2025 incident where a soldier wounded five fellow troops at a Georgia base. In 2019, a sailor killed two and injured a third at a Hawaii installation, while in 2015, a Kuwaiti-born US citizen attacked two military sites in Tennessee, killing four Marines and a sailor. The FBI attributed the violence to foreign terrorist influence.