Nidal Hasan’s firing squad execution will be ‘public,’ Hegseth says

Oct. 8 (UPI) — U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution of a former military doctor who killed 13 people in a mass shooting in 2009 on a military base in Texas would be “public.”

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth told podcaster Jack Posobeic in an interview on Wednesday.

Hegseth did not say how the execution would be publicized.

The Pentagon earlier this week announced Nidal Hasan would be executed by firing squad, which Hegseth recommended and U.S. President Donald Trump approved. Acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle scheduled the execution for 1 p.m. CST on Dec. 3 at Ford Hood, where the shooting took place.

The execution would occur on “a Thursday, we’re going to do it at one o’clock, which is when he did it, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth said Wednesday.

The U.S. military has not executed a soldier by firing squad since convicted deserter Pvt. Eddie Slovik was put to death in early 1945.

Hasan, 56, was convicted of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder and sentenced to death in August 2013 by a general court-martial panel for killing 12 U.S. soldiers and one civilian employee in a shooting spree at Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center on Nov. 5, 2009.

Hasan during the shooting shouted “Allahu akbar,” which is Arabic for “God is great.”

At his court-martial trial, he said the shooting was in defense of the Taliban leadership in the United States’ war with Islam. At the time of the shooting, the United States was engaged in armed conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan as part of Washington’s Global War on Terrorism.

The last military execution was that of Pvt. John A. Bennett in April 1961.