President Trump has approved a plan to put to death by firing squad the former Army major who went on a 2009 shooting rampage that left 13 people dead at Fort Hood in Texas, the Pentagon said Monday.
Nidal Hasan, a U.S.-born Muslim who worked at the base as a psychiatrist, was sentenced to death in 2013 by a jury of fellow officers. Hasan said he was trying to defend fellow Muslims who he believed had been unfairly targeted by U.S. forces.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended that Hasan face a firing squad and that Trump approved it, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement on social media.
"The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution," Parnell wrote. "Judgement day for Hasan has finally come."
The White House and Pentagon didn't immediately respond to questions about why Hegseth recommended a firing squad or when the execution might take place.
A lawyer for Hasan couldn't be identified Monday. During the trial, Hasan acted as his own lawyer and offered no defense for the Nov. 5, 2009, attack.
Families of some of the 13 people killed, and some of the 31 who were wounded in the attack, called the death sentence just at the time, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The decision comes days after Tennessee's Republican governor halted executions in the state after a woman convicted of murder survived two doses of a lethal injection. The botched execution has resulted in fresh scrutiny of the secretive supply chain for lethal injection drugs.
Last year, South Carolina put to death a man convicted of a 2001 double-murder by firing squad, the first person in the U.S. in 15 years.