United States President Donald Trump has approved the death by firing squad of Nidal Malik Hasan, a former army officer convicted of carrying out a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, an army base in Texas.
The move, if it proceeds, will revive executions in the army, which has not carried one out since 1961.
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Death sentences, as well as executions in the US military, are rare and require presidential approval.
Under the army’s code of military justice, premeditated murder does carry the death penalty, but the process is often strict and prolonged.
However, the Trump administration has shown more willingness to seek death penalties for serious crimes, including against civilians.
Here’s what we know about the case:
What is the presidential order?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had initially recommended an execution order for Hasan, and Trump has now approved it, according to an X statement posted by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell.
Parnell said the time and date of the execution will be set by Army Secretary Adam Telle, who is serving in an acting capacity.
“Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” he wrote.
What happened at Fort Hood?
On November 5, 2009, the US-born army major, Hasan, a psychiatrist in the force, walked into an army processing centre in Fort Hood, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and opened fire on fellow staff members waiting to get medical attention.
Thirteen people were killed, including a pregnant soldier, and 32 others were wounded during 10 minutes of shooting. Analysts have called it the worst shooting at a US military base targeting members of armed forces.
Hasan was shot several times after two officers engaged him and remains paralysed from the waist down.
What happened during the trial?
Hasan was immediately court-martialled, and military prosecutors, from the start, sought the death penalty against him.
However, the process would play out over the course of several years even after his conviction – largely because the US military is averse to capital punishment.
During the trial, Hasan represented himself and admitted to the attacks, saying he was trying to stop deployments to Afghanistan and the killing of his fellow Muslims. He was due to be deployed weeks later.
Investigations revealed Hasan had exchanged emails with Yemeni-American scholar Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of ties to al-Qaeda, before the shooting. He had also repeatedly voiced opposition to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to colleagues and the treatment of Muslims in the army.
Hasan made little effort to defend himself, and his assigned lawyers claimed his testimony aided the opposing side.
He was charged and convicted on 13 counts of premeditated murder in 2013, and jurors recommended the maximum sentence of death. Controversially, Hasan was charged with “workplace violence” because the military justice code does not address the crime of “terrorism”.
The judgement was further delayed by appeals mandated by the military, not because Hasan sought them.
In 2020, the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the death penalty for Hasan, and in 2023, the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces did the same. In March 2025, the US Supreme Court denied a mandatory petition for a judicial review.
In September 2025, Hegseth announced he was seeking presidential approval for Hasan’s execution.
At the time, there was no report of Hegseth specifically seeking death by firing squad.
The president holds the ultimate authority to specify the designated method of execution.
Other forms of execution could have been lethal injection or hanging, which the US military has used in the past.
What next?
While Trump’s approval will begin a series of steps towards preparing for the execution, Hasan can still put the process on hold for years with an appeal in the civilian federal court system.
However, that might be unlikely as Hasan made no effort to defend himself during the trial.
He has been remanded to the US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where three other men have also been on the military death row for years.
Among them is Hasan Akbar, convicted of two counts of murder after attacking fellow army members on a Kuwait base in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq.
Another is the convicted serial killer and rapist Ronald Gray, who was found guilty of four counts of murder and eight counts of rape in 2008. He was approved for execution in the same year under President George W Bush, but the process was put on hold by a judge.
Timothy Hennis, a former sergeant, was convicted in 2010 of a triple murder and is also on death row.
The last military execution took place in 1961, when former soldier John Bennett was hanged for the rape of an 11-year-old girl.
