WASHINGTON D.C (VINnews) — President Trump has approved a U.S. Army firing squad to carry out the death sentence of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the officer turned terrorist convicted of killing 13 people in a 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon said Monday.

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Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended the method and Trump approved it. Parnell wrote on X that the secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution, adding, “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”

Hegseth replied to the post with a single word: “Justice.”

Parnell’s statement said Hasan, “the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009,” killed 13 people and wounded 32 others while shouting “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great.”

Hasan, then an Army psychiatrist, walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center on Nov. 5, 2009, where troops were receiving medical checks before and after deployment, and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun. Twelve service members and one civilian were killed. Ages of the dead ranged from 21 to 62. More than 30 people were wounded. At the time, it was the deadliest attack on a U.S. military installation since Sept. 11, 2001.

A military jury convicted Hasan in 2013 of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder and sentenced him to death. He represented himself, called no witnesses and did not deny the shootings. He told the court he opened fire to protect Islamic insurgents from U.S. forces. Standby defense lawyers said they feared he was seeking execution.

He was not charged with terrorism. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has no terrorism offense. The Obama-era FBI described him as a homegrown violent extremist and said the attack was not part of a wider plot. Hasan, a U.S.-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, had been in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al-Qaida cleric later killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen.

Under federal law, a service member sentenced to death by court-martial cannot be executed without the president’s approval. If the sentence is carried out, Hasan would be the first person executed under the U.S. military justice system since 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The Pentagon did not give a date. Approval starts a series of procedural steps, and Hasan could still seek to delay the execution through a habeas corpus petition in civilian federal court. He asked the Supreme Court in 2024 to review his case; the court declined to take it up last year.

Firing squads are rare in the United States. The military last used one in 1945, when Pvt. Eddie Slovik was shot for desertion in France. South Carolina used firing squads in civilian cases three times last year, the first such executions in the country since 2010.