Colorado rally firebomber gets life in prison after asking for death
Mohamed Soliman, who killed an 82-year-old woman in the 2025 attack, tells court he wished to be executed
The man who threw petrol bombs at a pro-Israel rally last year in Colorado, setting several people aflame including a woman who later died from her burns, was sentenced on Thursday to spend the rest of his life in prison but said he wished to be executed.
Mohamed Soliman, 46, an Egyptian national, pleaded guilty to 101 charges brought by state prosecutors, including first-degree murder, then apologised in court and decried his own crimes as contrary to “the teachings of Islam” in a statement before his sentence was pronounced.
He still faces separate hate-crimes charges in federal court that carry a possible life sentence or the death penalty.
Dressed in white-and-orange-striped jail garb and seated beside his lawyer with his hands shackled in his lap, Soliman said he regretted that Colorado lacked capital punishment.
“I ask the prosecution from the federal case to impose the death penalty,” he said in pre-sentencing remarks, delivered through an Arabic interpreter near the end of the three-hour proceeding live-streamed from the Boulder County District Court.
Judge Nancy Salomone sentenced him to the maximum penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole under two definitions of first-degree murder.