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Daily Mail
37 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
FBI storm Colorado terror suspect's home as Trump admin reveals how Biden allowed 'illegal alien' to stay in the US
The home of an illegal alien suspected of committing an atrocious firebomb terror attack at a Colorado pro-Israel demonstration was surrounded by police last night. Mohamed Soliman, 45, unleashed terror on a group of about 30 peaceful protestors in Boulder, using a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to set eight victims alight. The casualties, which included an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, were rushed to hospital on Sunday afternoon with varying injuries but at least one was considered critical. Soliman arrived in the United States from Egypt in August 2022, but overstayed his initial tourist visa and was ultimately handed a two-year work permit by the Biden administration, which he also overstayed, DHS sources told Fox News. Now an illegal alien, the Trump administration turned up the heat on Biden overnight, demanding answers as to why Soliman was allowed to remain in the country despite twice breaching the conditions of his visa. 'Suicidal migration must be fully reversed,' White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said. 'The Biden Admin granted the alien a visa and then, when he illegally overstayed, they gave him a work permit. 'Immigration security is national security. No more hostile migration. Keep them out and send them back.' Soliman's latest work permit lapsed in March 2025. The sources said he had filed a claim with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services on September 9, 2022, and the status of that claim remains unclear. Authorities revealed late on Sunday night that the casualty toll had risen from six to eight as the investigation into Soliman's alleged actions continues Authorities revealed late on Sunday night that the casualty toll had risen from six to eight as the investigation into Soliman's alleged actions continues. The victims are now aged between 52 and 88. Two of them had to be airlifted to a burn unit with serious injuries, while the remainder suffered minor injuries. In addition to the Holocaust refugee, who has been described as a 'very loving person', a second victim is a professor at Colorado University. The FBI was quick to describe Soliman's actions as hate motivated and an act of terror. Officers within the FBI's Denver unit arrived at a home linked to the suspect to conduct 'court-authorized law enforcement activity' as part of the investigation. The unassuming El Paso County home was surrounded by officers as confused neighbors noted they didn't know the residents of the address well. 'As this is an ongoing investigation, no additional information is available at this time,' the FBI said. According to the New York Times, a woman was allowed to enter the home which had been identified as belonging to Soliman. And according to CNN, senior officials are closely examining the 45-year-old's mental health history. 'He's shirtless, screaming, used rudimentary (explosive) devices, and stuck around to be arrested,' one source said. The source said Soliman's method of attack did not align with a thought-out plan to cause large scale casualties. But chilling footage clearly demonstrated that Soliman was able to exact terror upon his targets at Pearl Street Mall on Sunday. Witnesses recalled the horror of seeing victims writhe around on the floor in pain as their skin melted off their bodies as Soliman paced up and down shouting vile accusations at the traumatized group. One witness, identified only as Brian, said he watched Good Samaritans rush toward the carnage to offer assistance to the victims. One woman was being wrapped up and attended to on the ground. Another, he said, 'looked like their skin had just melted off their bodies. 'He was very erratic, shouting and spewing terrible things at different people.' During the attack, he was shouting 'Free Palestine' at the Jewish demonstrators. California tourist Alex Osante was eating at an Italian restaurant off Boulder's famed Pearl Street pedestrian mall when he heard a 'big boom' and saw a woman 'on fire from head to toe on fire.' Within minutes, a nearby man ran to his table to grab two bottles of water before rushing back to victims writhing in flames on the ground. 'People were screaming and yelling … tripping over each other,' he told Daily Mail. 'The terrorist had a Molotov cocktail in his hand. He had two other bottles, and he threw a bottle at the group, and a lady caught on fire from head to toe – fully immersed in fire. 'And then the other few people, maybe four others, were also on fire – but not as bad,' he said. He said he saw victims lying on the grass and writhing around while it felt 'way too long' until first responders arrived. Meanwhile, Soliman appeared to taunt the victims while brandishing bottles of alcohol for the Molotov cocktails in each hand as smoke rose from the scene. Wearing only jeans and sunglasses, he yelled: 'End Zionists... they are terrorists' and 'free Palestine'. He also said: 'How many children have you killed?' according to the ADL Center on Extremism. Ed Victor, who was participating in the walk, told CBS he and a group of about 30 people had gathered for their peaceful demonstration on Sunday afternoon as they had every week since the October 7 attacks. He said they would sing songs and share the names of the hostages in Gaza each week. Sometimes they were heckled, often they were praised and clapped by onlookers. Whatever reception they received, they never expected to be attacked. Sharing details of Sunday's chilling events, he said: 'So we stood up, lined up in front of the old Boulder courthouse, and I was actually on the far west side. 'And there was somebody there that I didn't even notice, although he was making a lot of noise, but I'm just focused on my job of being quiet and getting lined up. 'From my point of view, all of a sudden, I felt the heat. 'It was a Molotov cocktail equivalent, a gas bomb in a glass jar, thrown. Av [another marcher] saw it, a big flame as high as a tree, and all I saw was someone on fire.' While another participant who had medical experience rushed in to help the victim, Victor stayed back with her husband, providing him comfort. Street performer Peter Irish described witnessing the horrors of the attack as 'traumatic'. 'I saw the aftermath,' he told CBS Colorado. 'It was like minutes after. I came out, it was chaos, people were writhing on the ground. It was traumatic to watch, to be honest with you. It was chaos.' Jewish human rights organization the Simon Wiesenthal Center told the Boulder attack came on the first day of a religious holiday. 'On the eve of Shavuot, a sacred celebration of Jewish identity and tradition, we are forced yet again to confront a horrifying reality: Being Jewish, supporting Israel, or simply gathering as a community now makes American Jews a target,' the center's CEO Jim Berk said. The incident has attracted an outpouring of support for the community and outrage for the suspect's actions, particularly as the Jewish diaspora in America still reels from the shooting death of two young embassy employees just a fortnight ago. FBI Director Kash Patel called the incident a 'terror attack' while Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said it 'appears to be a hate crime given the group that was targeted.' New York Congressman Ritchie Torres blamed a 'hate movement' for contributing to rising anti-Semitism in the community, while Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino issued a chilling warning that his department would not rest until justice was served.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Eight injured in ‘flamethrower' attack at pro-Israel rally in Colorado
Six people were injured in Boulder, Colorado, when a man attacked a group calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza using a makeshift flamethrower and an incendiary device. The FBI is investigating the incident as a "targeted terror Attack," with the suspect yelling "Free Palestine" during the assault. The victims, aged 67 to 88, sustained injuries consistent with being set on fire and were hospitalised with injuries ranging from serious to minor. A man was arrested at the scene; authorities expect to hold him accountable, with the FBI treating the Attack as an act of ideologically motivated violence. The Attack occurred at the Pearl Street pedestrian mall and follows a rise in antisemitic violence in the U.S. amid ongoing Israel-Hamas war tensions.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey review – beyond the bounds of fiction
From her debut, Nobody Is Ever Missing, to 2023's Biography of X, Catherine Lacey's work has tested the forms and fabric of the novel with brilliant unease. In The Möbius Book, her experiment crosses the blurred border of fiction into something else. Life writing, autofiction, memoir? Whatever you call it, The Möbius Book is deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention. A Möbius strip is a length of any material joined into a loop with a half twist. It's an uncanny shape, common and obvious, easily created and yet awkward to describe geometrically. For literary purposes, a Möbius is interesting because there's intricate structure and constraint but no ending. It goes around again, mirrored with a twist. Lacey's book takes this literally, the text printed from both ends, with memoir and fiction joined in the middle. Twin stories experiment with plotlessness and irresolution, while remaining aware of the way fiction attaches itself to linear plot and reverts to romance and quest. Characters find and lose love, find and lose meaning. In one half, two women, Edie and Marie, reminisce about their messy love lives and Christian beliefs in Marie's grotty apartment, ignoring the pool of blood forming outside a neighbour's door. In the other half, the first-person narrator leaves a controlling partner, recalls an ascetic adolescence and struggles to write and think about faith with clever friends during lockdown. Lacey is fascinated by literary form and by the metaphors for literary form, finding fiction at once a constraint and a space for play. Late in the day, the narrator, 'with trusted friends who knew how, got tied up and whipped', as 'a rite in all this, the chaos of having more freedom than I knew what to do with'. It's impossible, in a book so preoccupied with crucifixion, martyrdom and self-denial, not to see the image of the twisted Möbius loop in this friendly bondage. The structures of novels and the iconography of Christian martyrdom are both narrative responses to suffering; both offer freedom through constraint. But for Lacey, suspicious of pleasure, the compatibility of faith and art is questionable. The two modes of the book, which I hesitate to call fiction and memoir because neither is wholly committed to realism or reality, undermine each other, with images and anecdotes reappearing in transmuted form. The shadow of the angry, manipulative ex-partner falls across both, challenging the narrator's memories and intentions although, reassuringly, never inviting the reader's distrust. Edie's recounting of a transformative encounter with a dying, talking dog which speaks of the meaning of suffering (is 'dog' a Möbius rendition of 'God'?) is reprised when the narrator attends to a man lying on the street. In the first-person section, the narrator sees Matisse's painting The Red Studio in New York's Museum of Modern Art, 'the red I imagine on the floor of an otherwise white room', reflecting the blood pooling under a neighbour's door that Edie and Marie in the novel section decide is probably 'paint or something'. As the narrator comments: 'Reality at large has never been my subject, but interiority always has been.' Lacey asks large questions about interiority, especially with regard to the subject of Christian faith. For some readers, it may be an alien idea that the sharply modern intellectual rigour on display here could be combined with religious conviction. How can a narrator who can play off Proust against Gillian Rose seriously expect to find consolation in the old myths about the baby in the manger and the man rising from death? It's a question Lacey acknowledges, partly as unanswerable: 'We want to speak of gnosis and mysticism without our phones listening to us and populating browser ad space with advertisements for Goddess Retreats and bogus supplements and acupuncture mats.' Even so, the narrator attempts an exorcism, employs an 'energy healer', is seduced by ideas about magic numbers. 'Symbolism is both hollow and solid, a crutch, yes, but what's so wrong with needing help to get around?' The question is not rhetorical. There's a deep ambivalence in this book about needing literary and philosophical 'help to get around', about whether we're allowed to want or need art, which is related to the narrator's lack of appetite and consequent emaciation. 'I was afraid of the line between basic needs and cravings, between living and lust.' The fear of slipping from necessity into pleasure shapes the distrust of fiction. What if storytelling is for fun? What if we don't really need it? What if only what's necessary is true, or only truth is necessary? Inevitably, the fictional half of this book refuses many of the satisfactions of a novel. Like a miniature homage to WG Sebald's Austerlitz, the present action is mostly the recounting of past events, so that most of the characters, times and places appear only through a conversation between friends. There are complicated, triangular relationships in the background, between characters who never quite take shape, whose voices are only – and unreliably – recalled. Third-person narrative always calls into being a narrator, another layer of artifice, and here the slippage between present, past and past historic tenses also constantly reminds us that this story is at once engaging and not real. The questions are constant, implicit, teasing, elaborated rather than answered in the dark mirror of life writing. They don't go away. You can go round again. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
