Boulder, Colo. – Eight people who requested the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza were injured in an outdoor shopping center in Boulder, Colorado, by a man that the police, according to the police, used an improvised flamethrower and threw a incendiary device In a crowd. The FBI immediately described violence as a “directed terrorist attack.”
The suspect, identified by the FBI as Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, shouted “Palestine Free” during Sunday’s attack against the group of protesters, said Mark Michalek, the special agent in charge of the FBI Denver Field Office.
Soliman was arrested and taken to the hospital to receive treatment, but the authorities did not explain their wounds.
This is what we know about the attack:
The authorities said that the attacker attacked the protesters with a voluntary group called Run for His Lives, who organizes career and walking events to request the immediate release of the Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza, since they were captured by militants during the incursion to the south of Israel that began The Israel-Hamas War in 2023.
The group had gathered at the Pearl Street Pedestrian Mall, a four -block area in the center of Boulder frequented by tourists and students.
The Israel-Famas War has inflamed global tensions and has contributed to an increase in anti-Semitic violence in the United States. A week earlier, two employees of the Israeli embassy They were shot dead in Washington For a man who shouted “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza” while the police took him.
Police in Boulder evacuated multiple blocks of the pedestrian mall. The scene shortly after the attack was tense, since the agents of application of the law with a police dog walked through the streets looking for threats and instructed the public to remain clear.
Violence occurred four years after 10 people were killed by a shooting in a grocery store in Boulder, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northwest of Denver. The gunman was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder after a jury rejected his attempt to avoid imprisonment time Not guilty due to madness.
People injured in the Pearl Street attack vary from 52 to 88 years.
The photos of the scene showed a woman lying on the floor in the fetal position with soaked hair, and a man who helped her and receives water from someone with a jug of water.
The injuries that the authorities found were consistent with the reports of people who caught fire, said Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn, adding that the injuries varied from serious to minors.
Redfearn told journalists on Sunday night that it was too early to discuss a reason, but that the witnesses were being interviewed.
“It would be irresponsible for me to speculate on the early motive,” he said.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, was arrested on the scene. Charges were not immediately announced, but the authorities said they hope to hold it completely. “
The video of the scene showed it without a shirt and with jeans and holding two transparent bottles with a transparent liquid in them while shouting the spectators.
Another video shows a witness shouting: “He is right there. He is launching Molotov cocktails,” as a police officer with his advanced drawn weapon in the suspect.
FBI leaders in Washington said they were treating the attack of the rock as an act of terrorism, and the Department of Justice, which leads investigations to acts of violence promoted by religious, racial or ethnic motivations, denounced the attack as an “unnecessary act of violence, which follows the recent attacks against US Jews.”
“This act of terror is being investigated as an act of ideologically motivated violence based on early information, the evidence and witnesses accounts. We will clearly talk about these incidents when the facts justify it,” said the deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino, in a publication about X.
