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President Donald Trump put on hold this Friday the live broadcast of the execution of a man convicted of a massacre at a United States military base, an announcement by the Pentagon that caused outrage.
The execution of Nidal Hasan, a 56-year-old Palestinian-born Muslim military psychiatrist, is scheduled for December 3 in Texas (south).
The convict perpetrated an attack on the Fort Hood military base in 2009, inspired by Al Qaeda. Hasan killed 13 people, including 12 soldiers.
"They are making a determination on that, but he will be executed," Trump said at the White House when asked about the public broadcast of the execution.
"I don't really care how he dies, as long as he dies," the president added.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance had previously distanced himself from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's announcement to make the execution public. Republican and Democratic lawmakers also expressed rejection of the idea.
"I see those announcements. I don't know if that's going to happen," Vance stated when questioned by an AFP reporter during a trip to Ohio (north-central). "If it's broadcast live, I won't watch it," he added.
Wounded in the spine in the attack, Hasan moves in a wheelchair.
His execution, validated on Monday by Trump, will be the first carried out by the armed forces since 1961, and the first carried out by a firing squad since World War II.
A senior Pentagon official told AFP on Thursday that the execution would be broadcast live, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stated they would ensure "that people can see it, that it is public."
The last military execution in the United States occurred in 1961, when John Bennett was hanged for rape and attempted murder.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, denounced the live broadcast of the execution this Friday as a form of "torture."
Kyinzom Dhongdue, of the human rights organization Amnesty International (AI), described Hegseth's statements as "deeply shocking." "They are a terrible disregard for human dignity," she stated.
"Turning a state-ordered execution into a public spectacle does nothing but aggravate the cruelty of the death penalty," she added in a statement.
A live broadcast "would only aggravate the cruelty of the death penalty and perpetuate the cycle of violence that the authorities say they want to end," stated Justin Mazzola, head of the U.S. section of AI.
Catholic Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemned in a statement the "barbaric promotion of a culture of death."
[Publicidad]