US Secretary of Defense: The firing squad execution of a former US Army Major will be public US Defense Secretary Pete Heggest announced that the death sentence of Nidal Hassan, the shooter at the military base who was sentenced to death, will be carried out by firing squad and "in public". To right-wing influencer Jack Puzovich, in a clip posted by several official Pentagon accounts on the USS Lincoln, Hegst added: "People need to understand that such actions have serious consequences". According to Amnesty International, last year there were at least 17 cases of public executions in the world: six in Afghanistan and 11 in Iran. The Pentagon announced earlier this week that US President Donald Trump upheld the death sentence of Nidal Hassan for the 2009 fatal shooting at Fort Hood. In 2009, Nidal Malik Hassan, a US Army major and medic, shot and killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at the Fort Hood base. 12 of the dead and 30 of the wounded were soldiers. Hassan was shot and partially paralyzed during the response of a civilian policeman to this attack. In 2013, he was sentenced to death by a military jury for the crime of carrying out the attack, which was inspired by the ideology of al-Qaeda. In the court hearing Hassan's case, he was said to oppose the US military's occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and had an online conversation with a man said to be a member of al-Qaeda, namely Anwar al-Awlaki, an extremist cleric and American citizen who was later killed in a US drone strike in Yemen. Hassan's execution would be the first execution by the US military since 1961. It