Mohamed Sabry Soliman was sentenced Thursday to life in prison without parole after he pleaded guilty to a 2025 firebombing attack on a demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, where organizers had been gathering weekly in support of Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip. Boulder County District Judge Nancy Salomone sentenced Soliman after concluding the attack was aimed at victims because of their Jewish identity, and said Soliman chose the timing, location, and weapons to cause the most pain.
Before sentencing, Soliman spoke to the court through an interpreter and apologized to the victims, saying he regretted the June attack as not in line with Islamic teaching, according to the account presented in court. Salomone said Soliman targeted the victims because they were Jewish, and cited the decision as he prepared the sentence.
The firebombing occurred June 1 on Pearl Street, a downtown pedestrian mall lined with shops and restaurants. Prosecutors said Soliman posed as a gardener, brought multiple Molotov cocktails in a box, and attacked demonstrators as they gathered for the weekly pro-Israeli-hostages demonstration. The attack included two Molotov cocktails that burst and badly burned Karen Diamond, 82, and injured a dozen other people.
Diamond died three weeks later. In the statement prosecutors used at sentencing, Diamond’s sons described what she suffered as “indescribable pain.”
Salomone also addressed the nature of the conduct behind the plea, saying Soliman chose “a time and a place and a set of circumstances and weapons that were designed to inflict the most pain that you could.” Besides the life-without-parole sentence, the punishment included hundreds of years for dozens of additional charges, including attempted murder, assault and attempted assault, according to prosecutors’ description in court.
Before the sentencing, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty told the court the attack could have been worse, and said Soliman tried twice to buy a gun but was denied. Dougherty said Soliman then “decided to set them on fire” in what the district attorney described as a “cowardly” crime.
Soliman entered the United States in August 2022 on a tourist visa that expired in February 2023, according to federal authorities summarized in the court proceedings. He applied for asylum and received work authorization in March 2023, but that also expired, federal authorities said. At the time of the June attack, Soliman was living with his wife and their five children in an apartment in Colorado Springs.
Federal authorities alleged Soliman planned the attack for a year, and an FBI affidavit said Soliman told police after his arrest that he sought “to kill all Zionist people.” In court, Soliman said he respected Jewish people he had known but questioned the deaths of innocent people in Israeli attacks on Gaza, and he told the court: “Yes, I am against Israel and I can’t deny that. And that is my right.”
Soliman’s state case was resolved through his guilty plea, but he still faces separate federal hate-crimes charges. He has pleaded not guilty in the federal case, where prosecutors were weighing whether to seek the death penalty. Soliman’s federal defense lawyers argued that hate-crimes charges were not appropriate because, they said, he was motivated by opposition to Zionism, and that an attack motivated by political views is not considered a hate crime under federal law.
Prosecutors described the scope of the harm in the attack as involving 29 victims identified in the state case, including 13 people who were physically injured and others counted as victims because they could have been hurt. The case also involved injuries to a dog, and Soliman was charged with animal cruelty.
While Soliman awaited sentencing in the state case, his wife, Hayam El Gamal, and their children had spent 10 months in immigration detention until April, when a federal judge in Texas ordered their release on conditions that included electronic monitoring for El Gamal and their oldest child, who is 18. The couple divorced in April, and Soliman’s attorneys sought to block deportation pending a decision on whether El Gamal and the oldest child would need to be present for further proceedings in his federal case.