Washington, November 10: US President Barack Obama and investigators have pledged 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?'” Mr Obama said in a television interview on the eve of his visit to Fort Hood, in Texas.
“I’ll be heading to 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,” Mr Obama said of the shooting death on Friday 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, today he had recovered enough to be able to speak.
“He is talking. He is conversing with the medical staff,” a spokeswoman for the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio said.
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.
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 today.
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 today 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.
However, it said, Mr 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”.
Mr 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.
The shooting suspect “was a soldier”, Lt-Gen Cone said, “and we have other soldiers that, you know, that might have some of the same stress and indicators that he has.”
A hospital spokeswoman refused to say whether Hasan – who is said to have been under tremendous hardship from counseling war-scarred soldiers – had already been interviewed by army investigators.
The president and First Lady Michelle Obama were due to travel to Fort Hood tomorrow for a memorial service, with some 5000 people expected to attend.
—Agencies