Trump orders firing squad execution for mass shooter who killed 13 soldiers

Donald Trump has ordered a firing squad to execute an ex-US army psychiatrist who killed 13 people in Texas, the Pentagon said.

The US President approved the method to put Nidal Hasan to death by army firing squad in a military execution.

It came at the recommendation of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote on X.

The ex-army major killed 13 at Fort Hood in a 2009 shooting spree with a laser-sighted handgun that he later described as retaliation for US wars in the Middle East and to protect Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Witnesses told a court martial in 2013 Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar" - God is greatest in Arabic - during the attack that killed 12 unarmed active-duty soldiers and a retired serviceman, as well as wounding 32 others.

The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution, with Parnell adding that "judgement day for Hasan has finally come".

Death by firing squad was one of several forms of capital punishment recently added to permissible forms of execution by the Trump administration for the gravest of federal crimes.

This was in addition to electrocution and gas asphyxiation.

Military executions are rare and, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a death sentence imposed by court martial may not be carried out "until approved by the president".

If Hasan is executed, it will mark the first military execution since 1961, when Private John Bennett was hanged.

Trump's approval triggers a series of steps that could see Hasan's execution carried out, but he could reportedly put that on hold, potentially for years, with a habeas corpus appeal in the civilian federal court system.

At least five states have firing squads on the books and in 2025 South Carolina carried out the first such execution in the US in 15 years.

Four men, including Hasan, are currently on the military's death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. President George W. Bush approved the execution Ronald Gray in 2008, but it was put on hold by a judge and he remains at Leavenworth.

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The number of federal execution options was expanded, in part, because of the increasing difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections, a method that has proved challenging to carry out for many reasons.

Last week, Christa Pike survived a botched lethal injection execution in Tennessee.

Pike, who would have been the first woman executed in the state for more than 200 years, is alive but unconscious and in hospital on life support after being given two doses of pentobarbital.

Her lawyers previously urged the Tennessee Department of Correction to consider an alternative to lethal injection, such as hanging or firing squad, in anticipation of the trouble executioners have faced in establishing a sound intravenous line.

Hasan was sentenced to death by a military jury in August 2013 after finding him guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder for opening fire in a medical facility at the sprawling central Texas military base.

The shooting came weeks before Hasan, now 56, was scheduled to be deployed in Afghanistan.

After being shot by police upon his arrest, he was left partially paralysed and confined to a wheelchair.

Death Penalty Action, a group opposing capital punishment, said in response to the decision: "There ​is nothing Donald Trump loves more than the power to kill."

(c) Sky News 2026: Trump orders firing squad execution for mass shooter who killed 13 soldiers