On this day in 2009, 13 people were killed and more than 30 others wounded, when a US Army officer went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in central Texas.
Early in the afternoon of 5 November, 39-year-old Hasan, armed with a semi-automatic pistol, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) and then opened fire at a crowd inside a Fort Hood processing centre where soldiers who were about to be deployed overseas or were returning from deployment underwent medical screenings. Located near the city of Killeen, Fort Hood, which includes 880km² of facilities and homes, it is the largest active-duty US military post.
At the time of the shootings, more than 50 000 military personnel lived and worked there, along with thousands more family members and civilian personnel.
The massacre, which left 12 service members and one Department of Defence employee as well as an unborn baby dead, lasted approximately 10 minutes before Hasan was shot by civilian police and taken into custody.
In the aftermath of the massacre, reviews by the Pentagon and a US Senate panel found Hasan’s superiors had continued to promote him, despite the fact that concerns had been raised over his behaviour, which suggested he had become a radical and potentially violent Islamic extremist. Among other things, Hasan stated publicly that America’s war on terrorism was really a war against Islam.
In 2013, Hasan, who was left paralysed from the waist down as a result of shots fired at him by police attempting to stop his rampage, was tried in military court, where he acted as his own attorney. During his opening statement, he admitted he was the shooter (Hasan had previously told a judge that in an effort to protect Muslims and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, he had gunned down the soldiers at Fort Hood who were being deployed to that nation).
For the rest of the trial, Hasan called no witnesses, presented scant evidence and made no closing argument. On 23 August 2013, a jury found Hasan guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder, and he was later sentenced to death for his crimes.
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