Gunman kills 12 in shooting rampage at US base

KILLEEN, Texas, (Reuters) – An Army psychiatrist  opened fire with two handguns at the Fort Hood Army post yesterday, killing 12 and wounding 31 others, Army officials  said, adding the suspect had not been killed as previously  believed.

Authorities identified the suspected gunman as Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who had treated soldiers wounded in foreign wars  preparing for foreign deployment at the post.

“Our investigation is ongoing but preliminary reports  indicate that there was a single shooter,” Lieutenant-General  Robert Cone, Fort Hood’s commanding officer, told a news  conference. “The shooter is not dead but in custody in stable  condition.”

Cone said the suspect had been shot multiple times. He  previously said the suspect was killed by police officers  during the attack at the biggest military facility in the  world.
Asked whether the shootings were a terrorist act, Cone  said, “I couldn’t rule that out, but I’m telling you that right  now the evidence does not suggest that.”

The Army said the gunman opened fire at about 1:30 p.m. CST  (1930 GMT) at the Soldiers Readiness Processing Center, a group  of buildings where soldiers were getting medical check-ups  before leaving for overseas deployments.

Cone said the gunman had two weapons, one of them a  semi-automatic. “There is no indication that they were military  weapons,” he said.

It was one of the worst killings ever reported on a U.S.  military base. In May, a U.S. soldier at a base in Baghdad shot  and killed five fellow soldiers.

A cousin of the suspected shooter, Nader Hasan, told Fox  news that he had been ordered to serve a term in Iraq and had  been resisting such a deployment.

Nader Hasan said his cousin was a U.S.-born Muslim who had  joined the military from high school. He had served as a  psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in  Washington D.C., which treats many badly wounded troops.

“He was a psychiatrist at Walter Reed dealing with the  people coming back and … trying to help them with their  trauma,” he said.

He said his cousin had been transferred to Fort Hood in  April months ago and was very reluctant to be deployed to Iraq.  “We’ve known over the last five years that was probably his  worst nightmare,” he said.

The incident raised new questions about the toll that six  years of continuous fighting in Iraq and nearly eight years of  fighting in Afghanis-tan have taken on the U.S. military and on  individual soldiers, many of whom have been on several combat  tours.

OBAMA CONDEMNS ‘HORRIFIC OUTBURST’

U.S. President Barack Obama, speaking in Washington, called  the event a “horrific outburst of violence” and promised  “answers to every single question about this horrible  incident.”

Fort Hood is home to about 50,000 troops, although Texas  Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said only about 35,000 were on  base at the time. The fort, established in 1942, stretches  across 339 square miles (878 square km) in central Texas and is  the largest single employer in Texas.

It’s the only military post in the United States capable of  supporting two full armored divisions — the 1st Cavalry  Division and the 4th Infantry Division.

Base personnel have accounted for more suicides than any  other Army post since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, with  75 tallied through July of this year. Nine of those occurred in  2009, counting two in overseas war zones.

A former FBI criminal profiler highlighted the irony of the  gunman’s reported expertise as a psychiatrist specializing in  traumatic stress, which often affects combat soldiers.

“It may be that he succumbed to that which he was supposed  to heal,” Clint Van Zandt said on MSNBC.

Fort Hood is halfway between Austin and Waco, about 60  miles (97 km) from each city. Nearby Killeen, Texas, was site  of one of worst U.S. shooting rampages when a gunman drove his  truck into a Luby’s cafeteria in 1991, killing 23 and wounding  20 before killing himself.