BOULDER, Colo. — A man accused of firebombing a group of demonstrators voicing support for Israeli hostages in Gaza is expected to plead guilty Thursday to first-degree murder and dozens of other state charges, according to a court document.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 46, faces a sentence of life in prison without parole and an additional 400 years in connection with the June 1 attack, which killed one person and injured a dozen others, his attorneys wrote in a motion filed in a separate federal case.
Soliman, an Egyptian citizen, is accused of hurling makeshift molotov cocktails while shouting “Free Palestine” in the attack on a peaceful weekly walk along a downtown pedestrian mall in this college town northwest of Denver. One participant, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, later died of her injuries, and others were seriously wounded.
Soliman, who prosecutors say told police he wanted “to kill all Zionist people,” had previously pleaded not guilty to more than 180 state charges and to federal hate crime charges. The Justice Department is still considering whether to accept Soliman’s offer to plead guilty to the federal counts or instead pursue the death penalty, his attorneys wrote in the motion filed Sunday.
In that motion, Soliman’s attorneys sought to block the deportation of his ex-wife, Hayam El Gamal, and their five children, arguing that their in-person testimony may be necessary for future court proceedings. Soliman’s attorneys say the family members knew nothing about his plans for the attack, which they wrote was “profoundly inconsistent with his prior conduct.”
The family arrived in the United States on tourist visas in 2022, and Soliman applied for asylum for them the following year. The government acknowledged the application and issued work permits to Soliman and El Gamal, his federal attorneys said in court documents.
Even so, federal officers took the family — including children ranging in age from 5 to 18 — into custody two days after the assault and has since repeatedly sought to deport them.
El Gamal, who divorced Soliman this year, and the children were held in immigration detention in Texas for nearly 11 months, until a federal judge ordered their release in late April.
Two days after they arrived back in Colorado, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rearrested them and put them on a plane to a small airport in Michigan, from where they were flown to New Jersey en route to an unknown international destination, El Gamal’s attorneys said. The plane turned around and returned them to Colorado after two federal judges halted their removal.
“The United States Government has made its intentions abundantly clear: It will never give up its effort to deport Mr. Soliman’s ex-wife and children,” Soliman’s attorneys wrote this week.
Eric Lee, the family’s immigration attorney, has said that El Gamal, 42, suffered from a painful lump in her chest while in detention but was denied proper medical care. She and her children, Lee said in a statement Monday, “are presently recuperating from this experience and from the immense trauma they have suffered for the last year.”
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