Fort Hood shooting suspect ‘awake’
Man suspected of deadly attack at army base is now able to talk, spokesman says.
Hasan, born in the US to Muslim Palestinian parents, had been kept on a ventilator at a civilian hospital but was transferred to the army hospital on Friday.
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April 3, 2009: Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant, opens fire at an immigrant community centre in Binghamton, New York, killing 11 immigrants and two workers. Wong killed himself at the sceneHasan, 39, had spent years counselling severely wounded soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, many of whom had lost limbs fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was transferred to Fort Hood in April and was to have been deployed to Afghanistan, where the US military is engaged in an increasingly bloody war against Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.
Al Jazeera’s Josh Rushing, reporting from Fort Hood, said: “[Hasan] joined the army after high school and went to the Virginia Tech university to get a psychiatry degree through a military programme.
“Every day, he heard how horrible those stories were and he really started to question the wars, according to what his cousin and sources who knew him said.
“Hasan became more devout in his religion and started arguing with soldiers about whether the wars were right or not, to the point where he received disciplinary action and negative work reviews.
“It raises a major question – how can a person responsible for the mental health of soldiers returning [from war] be allowed to continue in this profession when he has these kinds of questions himself?”
Deployment fears
Hasan’s cousin, Nader Hasan, said in interviews that he had been agitated about being deployed to be sent overseas.
“We’ve known over the last five years that was probably his worst nightmare,” he said.
He told the New York Times newspaper that Hasan had retained a lawyer and sought to get out of the army before the end of his contract.
American Muslim groups expressed regret and stressed that the incident appeared to have been carried out by a single disturbed individual.
“Thousands of Arab Americans and American Muslims serve honorably every day in all four branches of the US military and in the National Guard,” the Arab American Institute said on Friday.
Multiple shooting incidents are not uncommon in the US, where there are relatively lax gun controls.
Fort Hood personnel have accounted for more suicides than any other army post since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, with 75 tallied through July of this year.
The base, about 100km from the state capital, Austin, is home to about 50,000 troops.