A man was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty on Thursday to killing one person and injuring a dozen others in a 2025 firebombing attack on a demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman looked down at a desk throughout the sentencing at the Boulder district court. He has meanwhile pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges for the attack last June.
Prosecutors are weighing whether to seek the death penalty in the federal case, according to his attorneys.
An 82-year-old woman who was injured in the attack later died. A dozen others also were injured.
Soliman is an Egyptian national who federal authorities say was living in the US without documentation. Investigators allege he planned the attack for a year and was driven by a desire “to kill all Zionist people”.
Speaking to the court through an interpreter for nearly a half an hour, Soliman offered apologies to the victims and condolences for Diamond’s death. “There are no words that can express my sadness for her passing,” Soliman said.
He said he wasn’t asking for leniency at sentencing for his convictions in state court and wanted prosecutors pressing federal hate crime charges against him to seek the death penalty.
“If I went back, I would not have done this as this is not according to the teaching of Islam,” Soliman said. “What I did came out of myself and only myself.”
In a statement read earlier in court by a prosecutor, Diamond’s sons asked that Soliman not be allowed to see his family again “since he is responsible for our mother never seeing her family again”.
Andrew and Ethan Diamond said their mother suffered “indescribable pain” for more than three weeks before her death. “In those weeks, we learned the full meaning of the expressions ‘living hell’ and ‘fate worse than death’,” Diamond’s sons said in the statement.
Tara Winer, Boulder’s mayor pro tem, said the attack was horrific and victims included close friends.
Soliman had been living with his family in a two-bedroom apartment in Colorado Springs – about 97 miles (156km) away – at the time of the attack. He had moved to the US from Kuwait in 2022 with his wife and their five children and worked in a series of low-paying jobs.
The couple divorced in April.
Investigators allege Soliman told them he intended to kill the roughly 20 participants at the weekly demonstration at Boulder’s Pearl Street pedestrian mall. He threw two of more than two dozen molotov cocktails he had with him while yelling, “Free Palestine!”
Federal prosecutors allege the victims were targeted because of their perceived or actual connection to Israel. Soliman’s federal defense lawyers argue he should not have been charged with hate crimes because he was motivated by opposition to Zionism, the political movement to establish and sustain a Jewish state in Israel.
An attack motivated by someone’s political views is not considered a hate crime under federal law.