WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — United States (US) President Donald Trump has approved the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, a US Army psychiatrist who shot dead 13 people at a military base in 2009, the Pentagon said Monday.

Hasan’s execution for the attack at Fort Hood in Texas — which also wounded more than two dozen people — will be the first carried out by the US military since 1961.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth “has recommended — and President Donald J Trump has approved — death by US Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a post on X.

“The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution. Judgment day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell wrote.

Hasan was sentenced to death by a military jury in 2013 for carrying out the Al-Qaeda inspired mass shooting at Fort Hood.

He chose to conduct his own defence during the trial but called no witnesses, gave no testimony, and made no attempt to deny the charges. Court-appointed defence attorneys expressed concern that he was seeking execution.

Hasan, US-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, opened fire on November 5, 2009, at a medical facility in the sprawling Fort Hood base, which served as a staging point for soldiers to deploy to combat zones.

Twelve of the dead and 30 of the wounded were soldiers. Hasan was shot by a civilian police officer who responded to the attack and is partially paralysed.

The court that convicted Hasan was told that he was opposed to the US military’s occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that he had spoken online with an alleged Al-Qaeda figure, radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen subsequently killed in a US drone strike in Yemen.