On the morning of 5 November 2009, Nidal Malik Hasan, a United States Army major and trained psychiatrist, walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Centre at Fort Hood in Texas, opened fire on unarmed colleagues lining up for medical clearances before deployment, and killed 13 people in what became the deadliest mass shooting on a US military installation in the country’s history.
Nearly 17 years later, on 3 December 2026, he is scheduled to die on the same base where he carried out the attack, by firing squad, at 1 pm, at precisely the hour the shooting began. It will be the first US military execution in more than six decades, and the first execution by firing squad since 1945.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement that US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had recommended the execution, and that it was approved by US President Donald Trump.
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“We are going to deliver final justice to an evil killer,” Trump told a rally in Texas earlier in the week.
Who Is Nidal Hasan?
Nidal Malik Hasan was born on 8 September 1970 in Arlington County, Virginia. He is an American former US Army major, former physician, and mass murderer who perpetrated the Fort Hood shooting, killing 13 people and injuring 32 others.
He was raised in a Palestinian-American family, attended Virginia Tech where he studied biochemistry, and entered the military’s medical programme, eventually training as a psychiatrist at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, where his academic record was, by the institution’s own assessment, marginal. His time in the military was marked by increasing signs of radicalisation that were identified but not acted upon.
Hasan came to the attention of two joint terrorism task forces in December 2008, as he corresponded by e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric and al-Qaeda sympathiser then living in Yemen. US intelligence agencies were aware months before the shooting that Hasan was attempting to make contact with an individual associated with al-Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.
According to those officials, the Army was informed of Hasan’s contact, but it was unclear what, if anything, the Army did in response.
Awlaki had presided at Hasan’s mother’s funeral in 2001, and just days following the shooting at Fort Hood, posted material online expressing his admiration for Hasan’s actions, calling him a “man of conscience.”
Army officials at Fort Hood said they were never told about Hasan’s issues at Walter Reed, where he had been stationed before his transfer to Texas. Army Chief of Staff General George Casey subsequently said he would convene a special review to understand how behavioural clues to Hasan’s unravelling had been missed or glossed over.
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