US President Barack Obama will attend a memorial service in Fort Hood tomorrow to honor victims of the shooting rampage in which 13 people died, the White House said.
Investigators were meanwhile working around the clock to uncover what triggered the shooting, which also wounded 30 people.
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, suspected in the killings that also wounded 30 people.
“All evidence at this point indicates the suspect allegedly acted alone,” Chris Grey, spokesman for the US Army criminal investigation division (CID), told reporters on Saturday, adding that no motive had yet been established.
Criminal investigators were poring over evidence to determine if the alleged shooter — Army doctor Major Nidal Malik Hasan — was motivated by Islamist ideology or had snapped under the pressure of his job counseling soldiers traumatized by combat.
An initial search of Hasan’s computer revealed no direct exchanges with known extremists, but US Army and FBI officials had yet to rule out possible links to terrorist groups, US media reported.
In retrospect, the signs of Hasan’s growing anger over the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seem unmistakable. But even people who worried his increasingly strident views were clouding his ability to serve the US military could not predict the rampage he stands accused of.
In the months leading to Thursday’s shooting spree, Hasan raised eyebrows with comments that the war on terror was “a war on Islam” and wrestled with what to tell fellow Muslim solders who had their doubts about fighting in Islamic countries.
“The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do,” said Val Finnell, who complained to administrators at a military university about what he considered Hasan’s “anti-American” rants. “He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out.”
Finnell studied with Hasan in 2007 and last year in the master’s program in public health at the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, where Hasan persistently complained about perceived anti-Muslim sentiment in the military and injected his politics into courses where they had no place.
“In retrospect, I’m not surprised he did it,” Finnell said of the shootings. “I had real questions about what his priorities were, what his beliefs were.”
Hasan remains in intensive care but breathing on his own late on Saturday at an Army hospital in San Antonio, Texas. Officials refused to say if he was talking to investigators.
At least 17 victims remain hospitalized with gunshot wounds, and nine were in intensive care.
Military investigators continue to refer to Hasan as the only suspect in the shootings but won’t say when charges would be filed. He likely would face military justice rather than federal criminal charges if investigators determine the violence was the work of just one person.
Hasan’s family described a man incapable of the attack, calling him a devoted doctor and devout Muslim who showed no signs that he might lash out.
Still, a picture has emerged of a man who was forcefully opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was trying to elude his pending deployment to Afghanistan and had struggled professionally in his work as an Army psychiatrist.
“I told him, ‘There’s something wrong with you,’” Osman Danquah, co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, said on Saturday. “I didn’t get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn’t seem right.”
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