Fort Hood, Texas: Military officials were starting yesterday to piece together what may have pushed an army psychiatrist trained to help soldiers in distress to turn on his comrades in a shooting rampage that killed 13 people and wounded 30 in Texas.
It was one of the worst killing sprees ever reported on a US military base, army officials said.
The suspected shooter, Major Nidal Malek Hassan, was on a ventilator and unconscious in a hospital after being shot four times during the shootings at the army's sprawling Fort Hood, officials said.
"He's stable and in one of our civilian hospitals," Colonel John Rossi, a deputy commanding general at Fort Hood said. "He's on a ventilator."
The army said the gunman opened fire at about 19.30 GMT (23.30 Dubai time) on Thursday at the Soldiers Readiness Processing Centre, a group of buildings where soldiers were getting medical check-ups before leaving for overseas deployments.
The gunman had two weapons, one of them a semi-automatic, and neither was a military-issued weapon, army officials said.
US President Barack Obama, speaking in Washington on Thursday, called the event a "horrific outburst of violence".
A cousin of the suspected shooter, Nader Hassan, told Fox News on Thursday that he had been ordered to serve a term in Iraq and had been resisting such a deployment.
The incident raised new questions about the toll that six years of continuous fighting in Iraq and nearly eight years of fighting in Afghanistan have taken on the US military and on individual soldiers, many of whom have been on several combat tours.
