US shooting: Probe continues

2009-11-10 08:44

Daphne Benoit

Fort Hood - President Barack Obama and investigators pledged on Monday to learn the motive behind last week's mass shooting at a US military base now its chief suspect has awakened in hospital and was able to talk.

"I think the questions that we're asking now ... is, 'is this an individual who's acting in this way or is it some larger set of actors?'" Obama said in a television interview on the eve of his visit to Fort Hood, in Texas.

"I'll be heading there tomorrow so that I can personally express the incredible heartbreak that we all feel for - for the loss of these young men and women," Obama said of the shooting death on Thursday of 13 people at the sprawling military base.

The suspected gunman in the shooting, army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan, was wounded by a female civilian police sergeant, and after days of critical care in hospital, on Monday he had recovered enough to be able to speak.

"He is talking. He is conversing with the medical staff," a spokesperson for the Brooke Army Medical Centre in San Antonio told AFP.

Amid warnings that scores of US troops under stress from repeated tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq are falling through the cracks, commanders at Fort Hood, Texas, said they had ordered officers to keep a careful watch.

Officers must now keep an eye out for similar signs of disquiet "across our entire formation, not just in the medical community, but look hard to our right and left", said base commander Lieutenant General Robert Cone.

New questions

A round-the-clock inquiry at Fort Hood has so far failed to uncover the motives for the shooting, which also left 42 wounded, according to a new toll released on Monday.

While investigators believe 39-year-old Hasan, a devout Muslim, acted alone, new questions arose as to whether the shooting could have been a terror attack, amid reports he may have had links to an American-born imam who has backed al-Qaeda.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Monday Hasan in late 2008 had communicated with a subject of a terrorist investigation, but that the topics he discussed were part of his work as a psychiatrist and "nothing else derogatory was found".

The investigators "concluded that Major Hasan was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning", the FBI said in a statement.

However, it added, Obama met with FBI Director Robert Mueller and ordered a full review of the shooting incident with the aim of determining whether "with the benefit of hindsight, any policies or practices should change based on what we learn".

Obama told ABC television that he was determined "to complete this investigation and we are going to take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again".

The bloody spree has left army officials scrambling to understand how one of their own could turn on his fellow soldiers, prompting pledges of better monitoring in the future.

Tremendous hardship

The shooting suspect "was a soldier", Cone told reporters, "and we have other soldiers that, you know, that might have some of the same stress and indicators that he has".

A hospital spokesperson refused to say whether Hasan - who is said to have been under tremendous hardship from counselling war-scarred soldiers - had already been interviewed by army investigators.

The president and First Lady Michelle Obama were due to travel to Fort Hood on Tuesday for a memorial service, with some 5 000 people expected to attend.

Defence Secretary Robert Gates visited the base on Monday to meet the families of those killed and to visit some of the wounded, including police sergeant Kimberly Munley, hailed as a heroine for confronting the gunman.

Federal investigators are examining possible links between the army psychiatrist and Anwar al-Aulaqi, who was the spiritual leader of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, The Washington Post reported.

Hasan had attended the mosque in 2001, a year before Aulaqi left the United States and settled in Yemen.

The imam was said to have crossed paths with al-Qaeda associates, including two September 11 hijackers, and is now believed to have become a supporter of the terror network, the paper said, citing a senior US official.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has said he would launch a probe into whether the army missed any warning signs which could have prevented the attack.

"There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act," he told Fox News Sunday.

- SAPA