Donald Trump approves death penalty by firing squad for Fort Hood shooter

US President Donald Trump has ordered the execution of a former US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009. According to Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, Nidal Malik Hassan will be shot. If carried out, the sentence would be the first military execution by firing squad since the end of World War II.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on social media X that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proposed the execution by firing squad and President Donald Trump approved the proposal.

The time and place of execution will be determined by the Minister of Defense, Parnell said, adding: “The day of reckoning has finally come for Hassan.”

Capital punishments are rare in the military, and the procedure for carrying out such a death sentence differs from that at the state level.

According to US law, the execution of a death sentence imposed on a military man requires the sanction of the US President.

If Hassan's death sentence is carried out, it would be the first execution in the US military since 1961, the Death Penalty Information Center said in a statement. As the organization clarifies, the execution in 1961 was carried out by hanging.

The last known case of execution carried out in the United States by a military firing squad was in November 1945.

Military psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 unarmed soldiers and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009. The attack took place in a crowded medical building where military personnel preparing to deploy to a combat zone were awaiting medical examinations and vaccinations.

It happened just weeks before Hassan, now 56, and his fellow soldiers were due to deploy to Afghanistan.

Hasan, who professes Islam, said in court that he wanted to protect his fellow believers and attacked his colleagues so that they would not be sent to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. During the attack, he shouted “Allahu akbar” (translated from Arabic as “Allah is great”).

Hasan himself was wounded by police during his arrest. As a result of his injury, he was left partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair.

The major never denied that he carried out the shooting at the Fort Hood base.

In 2013, a military tribunal found Hassan guilty of all 45 counts and sentenced the major to death by injection.

Hassan is currently one of four prisoners on death row in the US military court system.

In a statement issued in response to Trump's decision to shoot Malik Hasan, Death Penalty Action, an advocacy organization that advocates for the complete abolition of the death penalty, said: "There is nothing Donald Trump loves more than the power to take life."

Trump is a proponent of the federal death penalty and reinstated the practice with an executive order on the first day of his administration in January 2025.

The executive order signed by Trump describes the death penalty as “a critical means of deterring and punishing those who commit the most serious crimes and acts of violence that result in the death of American citizens.”

The firing squad was one of several types of capital punishment that the Trump administration recently added to the federal list of acceptable execution methods for capital crimes, along with electrocution and gassing.

The federal list of methods for carrying out death sentences was expanded, including due to difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections, the use of which sometimes turned out to be problematic for a number of reasons.

Thus, plans by Tennessee authorities to execute a woman for the first time in more than 200 years fell through last week when prison officials made a mistake when administering two lethal injections, as a result of which Christa Pike, sentenced to death for murder, remained alive. After the failed execution attempt, Pike was hospitalized in critical condition and placed on life support.

Most executions in the United States are carried out at the state level. The death penalty remains a legal form of punishment in 27 states. In five of them - South Carolina, Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah - the law allows the use of execution as a method of carrying out a death sentence.

Last year, a death row inmate was executed by firing squad in South Carolina, the first such case in that state and the first such use in the United States in 15 years.