The
Fort Hood shooting was a mass shooting that took place on November 5, 2009, at
Fort Hood, the most populous
U.S. military installation in the world, located just outside
Killeen, Texas.
[1] In the course of the shooting, a single gunman killed 13 people and wounded 29 others.
[1]
The sole suspect is
Nidal Malik Hasan, a
U.S. Army major serving as a
psychiatrist. He was shot and taken into custody by
Department of the Army Civilian Police officers,
[2] and is now
paralyzed from the chest down.
[3] Hasan has been charged with 13 counts of
premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder under the
Uniform Code of Military Justice; he may face additional charges at
court-martial.
[4][5]
Hasan is an American-born Muslim of
Palestinian descent. Internal Army reports indicate officers within the Army had discussed what they characterized as
Hasan's tendencies toward radical Islam since 2005. Additionally, investigations before and after the shooting discovered e-mail communications between Hasan and
Yemen-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who quickly declared Hasan a hero, as "fighting against the U.S. army is an Islamic duty". After communications between the two were forwarded to FBI terrorism task forces in 2008,
they determined that Hasan was not a threat prior to the shooting and that his questions to al-Awlaki were consistent with medical research.
In November 2009, after examining the e-mails and previous terrorism investigations,
the FBI had found no information to indicate Hasan had any co-conspirators or was part of a broader terrorist plot. The U.S. has since classified Anwar al-Awlaki as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, and
the UN considers Awlaki to be associated with al-Qaeda.
[6] A year after the Fort Hood shooting, however, questions still lingered as to whether the incident was caused by mental health issues, and government agencies still had
not officially linked Hasan to any radical terrorist groups.
According to eyewitnesses, Hasan took a seat at an empty table, bowed his head for several seconds,
[12] and then stood up and opened fire.
Initially, he reportedly jumped onto a desk and shouted: "Allahu Akbar!"[13][14] before firing at soldiers processing through cubicles in the center, and on
a crowd gathered for a college graduation ceremony scheduled for 2 pm in a nearby theater.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_shooting#cite_note-MT-14