Major Nidal Hasan, who has been charged with 13 murders over the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, is parlayzed from the neck down, incontinent and in severe pain, his lawyer said.
John Galligan told a magistrate on Saturday that the army psychiatrist, who is accused of killing 12 soldiers and a civilian on Nov. 5, is not a flight risk because he was severely wounded by four bullets fired by military police.
“He has no sensation from the nipple area down,” Galligan was quoted as telling the Washington Post in a telephone interview.
The closed-door hearing in Hasan’s hospital room lasted about an hour, the report said.
“In the middle of this hearing, he started to nod off and go to sleep,” Galligan said. “When I’ve spoken with him, he’s coherent, but your ability to have any meaningful exchange with him is limited in time and subject.”
The magistrate was considering whether to move Hasan, 39, to a more secure location than the army hospital where he is being treated. 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 that are increasingly spoken of in the US as an act of terrorism.
The hearing came amid fresh questions over whether authorities were alert to Hasan’s connections to a Yemen-based Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, after e-mails between the two were intercepted by the FBI. Awlaki formerly preached at a mosque Hasan attended.
ABC News reported that Hasan told Awlaki: “I can’t wait to join you [in the afterlife].”
Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, said he would be asking why the task force did not inform the army about the e-mails.
US Defense 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.”
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