A man who launched a Molotov cocktail attack on Jewish protesters in Colorado last year that killed one person and injured more than a dozen others was sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday, US media said.
Mohamed Soliman, a 46-year-old Egyptian, admitted a raft of charges, including first degree murder, over the horrific June attack in Boulder.
Soliman threw fire bombs and sprayed burning gasoline at a group of people who had gathered in the city in support of Israeli hostages held by Hamas after the militant group’s assault on Israel in October 2023.
Photo: Boulder Police Department / Reuters
Karen Diamond, 82, died from her injuries in the wake of the attack.
Thursday’s proceedings heard victim impact statements, including from Diamond’s sons, Andrew and Ethan Diamond.
“Our mother suffered indescribable pain for more than three weeks before succumbing to her injuries,” a statement read by Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said, the Denver Post reported. “Our children won’t get to receive her wisdom.”
Boulder County District Court Chief Judge Nancy Salomone told Soliman he would be imprisoned for life, without the possibility of parole.
She added more than 2,000 years to the sentence — the maximum allowed for each felony he was charged with.
“This court finds that you chose to victimize people that were peacefully gathering together,” Salomone said. “You chose to victimize these people because they were members of the Jewish community.”
Soliman also faces federal hate crime charges, for which he could be sentenced to death.
Police who rushed to the scene of the attack found 16 unused Molotov cocktails and a backpack with a weed sprayer containing gasoline that investigators say he had intended to use as a makeshift flamethrower.
US Department of Homeland Security officials said Soliman was in the country illegally, having overstayed a tourist visa, but that he had applied for asylum in September 2022.
Soliman’s now ex-wife, Hayam El Gamal, and the couple’s five children were taken into immigration custody after the attack, with US President Donald Trump’s administration quick to pledge to deport them.
The family had been held in an immigration facility in Texas until last month when a federal judge ordered their release.
The Washington Post, citing El Gamal’s lawyer, said authorities had subsequently rearrested them and attempted to deport them, only for federal judges to halt that effort.
Soliman’s attack was one of a number against Jewish people in Western countries since Hamas operatives killed more than 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel’s offensive in retaliation has left at least 72,000 people dead, according to Gaza’s health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN.
It has also left much of the Gaza strip in ruins and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, forcing many of them to live without access to sanitation, healthcare or adequate nutrition.
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
RSS