Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army Major who went on a mass shooting rampage killing 13 people and wounding many others at Fort Hood in Texas in November 2009, has been convicted of premeditated murder and attempted murder.
Hasan, a 42-year-old US-born Muslim, who waged ‘jihad’ over America’s “illegal and immoral aggression against Muslims” in Iraq and Afghanistan, could face the death penalty, when the sentencing phase gets underway on Monday. 17 days after commencement of Hasan’s court martial trial, a military jury on Friday convicted him of 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murder.
Armed with two guns, Hasan had shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire. All his victims, barring one, were soldiers. Hasan himself was paralysed from the waist down after being shot by an Army civilian police affair during the rampage. Born to Palestinian parents who had immigrated to the United States from the West Bank, Hasan went on the shooting spree less than a month before he was due to deploy to Afghanistan. He has lost both parents. His father died in 1998 and his mother three years later. He has two younger brothers.
A psychiatrist, Hasan has admitted to the killings, saying previously that his mission was to kill as many soldiers as he could as part of his jihad to protect “my Muslim brothers” from American soldiers deploying to Afghanistan. A year after the mass shooting, Hasan had told a military mental health panel that he wished he had died in the attack and become a ‘martyr’. In documents leaked to journalists during the trial, he revealed that he had told the health panel that he could “still be a martyr” if he got the death penalty.
During investigations following the rampage, it emerged that the FBI had failed to act in time against Hasan, despite becoming aware that he had exchanged as many as 18 e-mails with Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemeni-American cleric who turned out to be a leading figure of AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) and was eventually killed in a US drone strike in 2011.
Some family members of Hasan’s victims have sued the US Government for missing the warning signs of Hasan’s extremist views before the attack. They are also sure that Hasan was never charged as a terrorist. Investigators in the FBI and US Army had determined that Hasan acted alone. At the trial, Hasan acted as his own attorney, although he had three court-appointed standby defence lawyers. He, however, said very little other than telling the jurors that he was the gunman. He did not call anyone to testify his defence.
After Friday’s conviction, Texas Governor Rick Perry said, “Nidal Hasan’s cowardly attack on our military was a deliberate act of terror against our country. This guilty verdict affirms we are a nation of laws, honors the victims of this heinous act, and proves that, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy, we will never waver from the core principles for which they gave their lives: freedom, liberty and democracy.”