Major Nidal Hasan, who has been charged with 13 murders over the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, is paralysed from the neck down, incontinent and in severe pain, according to his lawyer.
The lawyer, John Galligan, told a hearing by a military magistrate on Sunday that the army psychiatrist, who is accused of killing 12 soldiers and a civilian on November 5, that his client was severely wounded by four bullets fired by military police and is not a flight risk. The magistrate was considering whether to move Hasan (39) to a more secure location than the army hospital he is being treated at in San Antonio. He ruled that the major could remain where he is for now.
The military has said it will seek the death penalty for Hasan, a Muslim, for the killings which are increasingly spoken of in the US as an act of terrorism.
The hearing came amid fresh questions over whether the authorities were alert to Hasan’s connections to a Yemen-based radical Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, after email messages between the two were intercepted by the FBI.
Al-Awlaki formerly preached at a mosque attended by Hasan. The FBI has said an analyst with the Joint Terrorism Task Force concluded that Hasan’s views on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were typical of those of many Muslims in the US military. ABC News reported that Nisan told al-Awlaki “I can’t wait to join you [in the afterlife].”
Carl Levin, chairperson of the Senate armed services committee, said he will be asking why the task force did not inform the army about the emails. Senator John McCain said on Saturday that he believes the emails were not acted on in part because of “political correctness”.
The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, has ordered all branches of the military to seek better ways of “identifying service members who could potentially pose credible threats to others”. – guardian.co.uk