Dark motives of army base killer

In army offices crowded with hundreds of soldiers, Hasan, a 39-year-old American-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, was somehow able to fire at least 100 times, pausing repeatedly to reload 20-round magazines, before he was shot by military police.

He was carrying another pistol, a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, but does not appear to have used it.

At one point, said Specialist Eliot Valdez, who witnessed the aftermath of the assault, Hasan was shooting the occupants of a crowded room like "fish in a barrel ... It was too easy, you can close your eyes and hit eight people".

As Hasan lay paralysed in a coma at a military hospital in San Antonio, Texas, yesterday, investigators were struggling to establish a motive for an unprecedented mass murder that has stunned the US military establishment, shaken President Barack Obama's White House and raised alarming questions about whether Hasan's superiors should have seen a disaster coming.

Amid a flood of new details about the quiet, pious yet mostly solitary soldier who screamed "Allahu akbar" (God is the greatest) as he mowed down his army colleagues, his purchase of an expensive pistol in August was one of several signs that he may have been under stress for months, if not years.

Contradictory explanations were offered for Hasan's widely reported dismay at his imminent posting to active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. Members of his family claimed that after a long and apparently difficult search to find a wife, he had recently met a Muslim woman he intended to marry, although Texan sources said they had found no evidence of a fiancée.

Mohammad Mohammad, a Palestinian cousin living in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said Hasan had not wanted to leave his future spouse. He also claimed that Hasan had tried unsuccessfully to leave the army after enduring taunts about his religion.

"We're not trying to make excuses for Nidal's behaviour," Mohammad said, "but we imagine that Nidal was under so much pressure that he couldn't take it. He was a very quiet man. He must have bottled it all up."

Another US-based cousin said Hasan had been "harassed" by colleagues who called him a "camel jockey" after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

A different explanation was provided by Duane Reasoner, an 18-year-old Texan who had met Hasan at a local mosque and was seeing him regularly to talk about Islam. Reasoner told the Los Angeles Times that Hasan was "mentoring" him about the Koran and had talked about his military life as they shared Chinese buffets at the Golden Corral restaurant near the base.

"He didn't want to be deployed," Reasoner claimed. "He said Muslims shouldn't be in the US military, because Muslims shouldn't kill Muslims. He told me not to join the army."

It also emerged that Hasan had consistently expressed opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars since his early days at Walter Reed. One of his fellow students recalled Hasan arguing that suicide bombers were comparable to soldiers who fell on grenades to protect their colleagues. "I really questioned his loyalty," Dr Val Finnell said.

Hasan is suspected of making similar remarks about suicide bombers in internet posts that were spotted by federal agents several months ago, but were never conclusively linked to him. Investigators have since seized several computers that he is believed to have used in different locations.

Other colleagues noted that although he was openly opposed to war, and often wore Middle Eastern-style robes on civilian occasions, he never uttered anti-American sentiments.

"I didn't find him to be depressed at all," said Major Khalid Shabazz, who was Fort Hood's Muslim chaplain until recently. "I found him to be very pleasant." A former colleague in Maryland added: "He didn't give the impression that he was a fanatic or angry."

Colonel Kimberly Kesling, Hasan's superior medical officer at Fort Hood, said the major had provided "excellent care for his patients ... there was never any indication he would do something like this".

Hasan is expected to recover consciousness and his motives may eventually become clearer. Yet there are several other questions about the assault and its immediate aftermath that the Pentagon and the White House may find equally difficult to answer.

Early last Thursday afternoon, Fort Hood's Soldier Readiness Center was swarming with troops on their way in or out of the base. Regarded by soldiers as a bureaucratic nightmare, the centre was a hive of long queues and endless deployment paperwork.

With the base in low security mode, and only occasional random checks for visitors carrying weapons, it was easy for Hasan to enter the centre with his military ID. Earlier that morning he had laughed and chatted over coffee at his local convenience store. He had been emptying his flat of furniture, but told neighbours he was going to war. Inside the readiness centre, Sergeant Johnny Kallon was among the soldiers waiting at about 1.30pm for the papers he needed before he deploys to Iraq in February.

"I heard shots being fired, and thought: what's going on?" Kallon said. "We heard screaming and shouting, yelling and crying. Everybody was calling for medics. We started helping soldiers who were bleeding. I was shaking and crying."

Marquest Smith, a 21-year-old private, was in an office cubicle with a civilian woman when the first shots were fired. "I heard yelling and moaning and then someone shouted 'Gun'," he said. He tried to block the door of the cubicle. The gunman fired at him, but hit only the heel of Smith's boot.

Many others were not so lucky. The victims included Aaron Nemelka, 19, who had joined the army last year straight from school; Jason Hunt, 22, who had just got married; and Francheska Velez, a 21-year-old oil tanker driver who had already completed tours to Korea and Iraq. Velez was two months pregnant with her first child. At one point Hasan jumped on a table and emptied his gun into the screaming crowd. Even though he had to pause to reload, nobody got near enough to pounce on him and nobody else in the building had a gun.

Exactly how Hasan was able to shoot so many soldiers before he was finally challenged remains a mystery, complicated by a bewildering series of erroneous reports issued by military officials in the hours immediately after the attack.

"It was hard to imagine one person did all that shooting," noted Major Stephen Beckwith, a doctor at the base hospital who said he was "stunned" by the number of victims with multiple gunshot wounds.

Concerns that some of the dead might have been the victims of "friendly fire" - shot by their own side in the chaos of the assault - were dismissed by military officials who insisted that only one gun was used before military police arrived. Officers have not yet explained why Hasan was at first reported dead, or why at least two other soldiers were arrested and later released.

General George Casey, the US Army chief of staff, described the assault as a "kick in the gut" and ordered Fort Hood commanders to review any security flaws that might have contributed to so much bloodshed. Officials depicted the assault as an isolated incident that could not have been prevented. Yet it is already clear that Hasan has shattered the previously comfortable assumption that US military bases are the safest places in America.

"I was sent to the Ramadi area of Iraq for 15 months in 2007-8", said Refugio Figueroa, a 22-year-old field artillery specialist now based at Fort Hood. "My unit came under small arms fire, but there were no major events. I can't believe this happened not in Iraq but when I came back to Fort Hood."

In the end the carnage was stopped by a 5ft 4in military policewoman who earned the nickname "Mighty Mouse" when she was a civilian officer in her native North Carolina.

Sergeant Kimberly Munley, a 34-year-old mother of two, was on her way to have her car repaired when she heard a police radio report of gunfire at the base. She arrived at the readiness centre just as Hasan emerged from the building, chasing a wounded soldier.

Munley, who shot her first deer on a hunting trip as an 11-year-old, did not flinch as Hasan shot at her, hitting her in both legs. Although it is no longer clear that she fired the shot that hit Hasan in the chest and knocked him to the ground - witnesses say her male partner also opened fire - she was being hailed as an American hero who stood her ground and was the first to raise a gun against a madman.

Whether or not Hasan turns out to be an Islamic extremist, a lovesick bachelor - or a combination of the two - his assault was the worst news imaginable for an American president who has been struggling to regain the drive and popular acclaim that fuelled his election campaign last year.

It was President George W Bush's proudest boast that after the disaster of 9/11, no further terrorist attacks occurred on American soil on his watch. Hasan may not have been a member of a terrorist group, but his name alone brought a foreign war to America's door, and confidence in the White House may suffer a severe blow.

Obama did little to reassure his supporters last Thursday, when his first reactions to the Fort Hood assault - awkwardly sandwiched into unrelated remarks about Native Americans - were described by several commentators as ill-judged.

As he continues to agonise over his crucial decision on the proposed build-up of troops in Afghanistan, Obama cautioned on Friday against "jumping to conclusions".

He was referring to the Fort Hood tragedy, but he may also be hoping that Americans do not rush to judge him.