Mohamed Soliman, the Egyptian national accused of firebombing a pro-Israel rally in downtown Boulder last June, will plead guilty Thursday to all 184 charges he faces in Colorado state court, his attorneys disclosed Sunday — a capitulation that would deliver a sentence of life without parole plus at least 400 years, while a separate and potentially more consequential federal death penalty case remains unresolved.
The disclosure emerged not in a routine court filing but in an emergency petition asking a federal judge to stop the deportation of six of Soliman’s immediate family members — his ex-wife and five children — before federal prosecutors decide whether to seek his execution. The defense argued that removing his family from the country would strip Soliman of his constitutional right to present them as mitigating character witnesses in a capital trial, a right that would become meaningless if they were thousands of miles away when the proceedings began.
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The family’s situation has been its own ordeal running parallel to the criminal case. They were taken into immigration custody in June 2025 immediately after Soliman’s arrest and held at a detention facility in Texas for more than 10 months before a court ordered their release on April 23. Two days later they were re-arrested. They were placed on a plane bound for Michigan and ultimately headed toward deportation when defense attorneys intervened, forcing immigration officials to return them to Denver and release them again on April 26. Their current status was not immediately confirmed.
In the federal case, Soliman’s attorneys said he has offered to plead guilty in exchange for a lifetime prison sentence rather than face execution — an offer the government has not yet accepted or rejected. The state plea, scheduled for Thursday in Boulder County District Court, would resolve the 184-count indictment covering multiple charges of murder, attempted murder, assault and criminal use of explosives and incendiary devices. An online court docket listed a “filing of charges hearing” for Thursday, consistent with the defense account.
The attack that generated those charges took place on June 1, 2025, at a peaceful rally in downtown Boulder organized to draw attention to Israeli hostages taken by Hamas during the October 7, 2023 attack. Soliman threw two Molotov cocktails into the crowd and deployed a makeshift blowtorch fashioned from a commercial weed sprayer, yelling “Free Palestine” as the gasoline bombs ignited. Authorities identified 29 victims, including those burned directly and others injured while fleeing or close enough to qualify as targets of attempted murder under Colorado law.
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One victim did not survive. Karen Diamond, 82 years old, died of her injuries later that month.
According to prosecution affidavits, Soliman told investigators after his arrest that he had wanted to “kill all Zionist people” and had been planning the attack for a year. He said he delayed carrying it out until after his daughter’s high school graduation.
The Boulder County district attorney’s office declined to comment on Monday. Soliman’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the US Attorney for Colorado declined to address the status of the federal case.
The guilty plea Thursday will close the state chapter of a prosecution that began with one of the deadliest antisemitic attacks on American soil in recent years. The federal chapter — and with it the question of whether Soliman will die in prison or be executed — remains open, contingent on a prosecutorial decision that the government has not yet made public and that the family deportation fight has now pulled into constitutional territory.