US officer to die for gun rampage Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the army psychiatrist who admitted shooting to kill more than 40 unarmed soldiers nearly four years ago, once said he wished he had died in the attack so he could become a martyr. On Wednesday, after deliberating a little more than two hours, a jury of army combat veterans and senior officers sentenced him to death by lethal injection. The same jury had found Hasan guilty of 45 counts of murder and attempted murder in a shooting rampage that a Senate report called the deadliest act of terrorism on US soil since September 11, 2001. The army's lead prosecutor, Colonel Michael Mulligan, told the court Hasan was not and never would be a martyr. "Do not be fooled," he said. He is not giving his life. We are taking his life. This is not his gift to God. This is his debt to society. Hasan is likely to become the first US soldier in decades to be executed in the military's death chamber at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, an execution that will require presidential approval. Driven, he said, by a hatred of US military action in the Muslim world and a desire to protect Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, Hasan turned on fellow soldiers. Firing 146 rounds at men and women as they crawled on the floor or crouched behind cubicles, he killed 12 soldiers and a civilian who lunged at him with a chair. Inside a Fort Hood courtroom fortified with blast-resistant barriers, Hasan showed no emotion as the jury forewoman, a US Army colonel, read the sentence. All 13 jurors voted for the death penalty. Other death sentences have been handed down by juries in military courts in recent years - Hasan Akbar, an army sergeant convicted of a grenade attack on his own camp in Kuwait, received one in 2005 - but experts in military law said Hasan's case was unique. Hasan was the first defendant to represent himself in a military capital-punishment case in modern times, raising issues about the requirement that death penalty cases be given special protections to ensure a fair verdict and sentence. Some military legal experts suggested that Hasan's case - in which he became a non-participant at his own trial and sought the death sentence - represented a breakdown of military justice. Hasan admitted in his opening statement that he was the gunman. He asked few questions and made no closing argument. The jury never heard much of evidence explaining his wish for martyrdom. In a July 2011 jailhouse statement to the al-Jazeera network, Hasan quoted the Koran, where God, he said, would give "glad tidings to the believers who do righteous deeds, that they shall have a fair reward." In December 2010, he told a military panel that if he died by lethal injection, "I would still be a martyr."