Prosecutors set to present evidence against man charged with hate crime in Boulder attack
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, is scheduled to appear in federal court in Denver for a preliminary hearing on a hate crime charge stemming from the June 1 attack in Boulder. Investigators say he planned it for a year.
He has also been charged in state court in Boulder with attempted murder and assault counts as well as crimes related to the 18 other Molotov cocktails police say he did not use.
Soliman is represented by public defenders in both federal and state court who do not comment on their cases to the media.
Federal authorities say Soliman, an Egyptian national, has been living in the U.S. illegally.
Investigators say Soliman told them he had intended to kill all of the roughly 20 participants at the weekly demonstration on Boulder's popular Pearl Street pedestrian mall, but he threw just two of his 18 Molotov cocktails while yelling 'Free Palestine.' Soliman told investigators he tried to buy a gun but was not able to because he was not a 'legal citizen.'
Soliman did not carry out his full plan 'because he got scared and had never hurt anyone before,' police wrote in an arrest affidavit.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation's founding motto in 1935 was 'Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity', but by the late Seventies the third of those tenets was thought to be distinctly lacking in the court of US public opinion. Forty-eight years under its controversial founding director J Edgar Hoover had taken their toll. His patriotic instincts may not have been in doubt, but his methods and principal targets most certainly had been. In 1978 the Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, proposed to do something about restoring the tarnished reputation of an agency that had overstepped in countering perceived Marxist subversion in the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam, while paying too little attention to corruption in high office and white collar and organised crime. 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A senator and six congressmen were snared and convicted in 1981. 'There were times when the undercover operation was the only way,' Webster told an FBI oral history project. A man who saw ethics in black and white, strictly framed by law, he tried and failed to impose a written legal charter defining the limits of what the FBI could do. However, tighter budgetary constraints were imposed along with greater accountability to Congress on how money was spent. From 1980, he dedicated far greater resources to dealing with the threat of terrorism. 'We were not having Oklahoma bombings and [World] Trade Centers, but we were having an average of 100 terrorist incidents a year in the US, all of which were life-threatening, so I asked that that be made a top priority,' he said. He identified a lack of diversity as a contributing factor to some of the bureau's failures. As such, he was proud of having increased the number of female operatives from 90 to some 800 during his nine years in the post. 'We doubled the number of African-Americans. We did about the same thing with Hispanics.' The end of his tenure at the FBI laid the foundations for his second great act of public service, as director of the CIA from 1987 to 1991. An operation had gathered evidence that the CIA had been involved in an unconstitutional scheme to sell arms to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with the added advantage of creating leverage to free American hostages in Lebanon. Proceeds from the arms sales would then be used to finance the anti-communist Contra rebels against the Marxist regime in Nicaragua, in defiance of a congressional ban. It was clear from the investigation that national security advisers were implicated in the biggest White House scandal since Watergate. It broke in November 1986. Months later, President Reagan appointed Webster director of the CIA with a brief to restore public confidence — a 'safe pair of hands' who could placate Congress after the departure of that zealot for political intrigue and clandestine operations, William Casey. Webster approached the task with prudence. John Bellinger, his assistant at the CIA, recalled: 'Judge Webster would always ask, 'What's chapter two?' He thought ahead of what the consequences of an initial decision would be.' Although he was allowed to attend more social functions at the White House than his predecessor because, in the estimation of Nancy Reagan, his table manners were a marked improvement on Casey's, it did not betoken admittance to Reagan's inner circle. Refusing to toady up to 'big hitters' around the president, Webster insisted on total transparency in all his dealings in the White House. 'If the White House invited me to come over to talk about something and hadn't called the department first, I would always call the attorney-general and say, 'I was invited to go over, would you or somebody like to go over with me?' I wanted the protection of working through the department.' He respected Reagan as 'a very polite person who wasn't out to get people but was out to get the job done right'. Though he often played tennis with Webster, Reagan's successor George HW Bush was less inclined to defer to him and often acted on his own initiative to gather intelligence reports, especially as some in the White House, including Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz (obituary, February 8, 2021), had been critical of the quality of his briefings. When Bush became president in January 1989, Webster found himself gradually superseded by Casey's former deputy, Robert Gates, who was appointed deputy national security adviser. Gates was suspected of undermining Webster, while Bush's chief of staff John Sununu and the secretary of state James Baker were also suspected of briefing against him. His relationship with Bush was fatally wounded after Webster disagreed with the president's plan to invade Panama in December 1989 to topple the corrupt dictator General Noriega. Several months later, Webster presented Bush with powerful evidence of Saddam Hussein's plans for an imminent invasion of Kuwait a week before this actually occurred on August 2, 1990. Bush chose instead to trust his personal contacts in the Middle East and discounted the evidence. Some argued that it was Webster's much-vaunted independence from the foreign policy-making process that undermined his credibility at this crucial juncture. The CIA was then deemed to have failed in its evaluation of Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons capability and in particular its undercounting (by 300) of the Scud missiles that Iraq had at its disposal. The agency was given a roasting by General Norman Schwarzkopf for the unreliability of its satellite-imaging technology in assessing bomb damage. Throughout the Gulf War, Webster had met Bush daily to brief him, but he was not one of the 'Gang of Eight' who effectively ran the show. In May 1991 Webster dropped hints that he might be prepared to retire, though more in the hope that Bush would rush to dissuade him than otherwise. However, Bush readily acquiesced and nominated Gates to replace him. Webster had inherited a demoralised organisation, uneasy about the legality of its clandestine operations and uncertain about its role. It needed someone with his genuine respect for Congress to guide the agency through the thicket of external criticism while maintaining its effectiveness. Although there were some intelligence blunders over China and eastern Europe, there were solid achievements as well; the CIA correctly identified nuclear and chemical weapons proliferation as the most significant trend; it predicted the economic travails of the Soviet Union and the likelihood of an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev as well as the civil war in Yugoslavia; and it developed a policy of economic intelligence-gathering towards foreign trade competitors. Webster may have been politically naive and inept at wooing the press, but he kept the CIA on a straight course. Through it all, he stuck to his guiding principle: 'Order protects liberty and liberty protects order.' William Hedgcock Webster was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1924 to Thomas Webster, a farmer and small businessman, and Katherine (née Hedgcock). His was a traditional Christian upbringing, steeped in 'God, family, and service'. He attended Amherst College, Massachusetts, but interrupted his studies there to serve in the US Naval Reserve from 1943 to 1946, attaining the rank of lieutenant. He went on to study law at Washington University Law School in St Louis, graduating in 1949 and joining a law firm in the city. However, he was recalled to the navy in the Korean War, during which he was assigned a member of the legal staff to defend a seaman who had been accused of theft. He urged his client to remain silent, as the man had not been advised of his right to legal representation prior to his interrogation. Although the ploy antagonised his senior officers, Webster was congratulated by fleet headquarters and his procedure was incorporated into the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Returning to private practice at the same St Louis law firm, he was elevated to partner after four years and appointed US attorney for the eastern district of Missouri by President Eisenhower in 1960. Resigning from this post after the inauguration of President Kennedy, Webster went back into private practice. In 1971 President Nixon appointed him judge of the United States district court for eastern Missouri at a salary less than half what he had been receiving from his law partnership. None of the 44 decisions that he handed down was reversed by a court of appeals and in 1973 he was appointed to the federal Court of Appeals for the eighth circuit. His record as an appeal court justice was characterised by judicial restraint. He rarely refuted the decisions of juries or lower courts and only overturned 16 of the more than 600 appeals he heard. In criminal cases he turned down suits brought by members of the militant American Indian Movement who had occupied Wounded Knee, but ruled in favour of a black woman seeking to bring a class action suit against the Pillsbury Company on grounds of race and sex discrimination. Notably, Webster joined a ruling that the University of Minnesota could not deny recognition to a campus organisation supporting gay rights. He also supported a suit by women on the Fargo, North Dakota, police force who were paid 50 per cent less than men with comparable duties. In 1975 he was one of six finalists considered for promotion to the US Supreme Court bench. Webster was first married to Drusilla Lane in 1953. She died of cancer in 1984. In 1990 he married Lynda Jo Clugston, a 34-year-old hotel sales executive, who had some years earlier applied to join the CIA and been turned down for health reasons. Their courtship was not easy. Whenever Clugston entered his bedroom, security alarms would go off. She survives him along with three children from his first marriage: Drusilla, Katherine and William Jr. After leaving the CIA, Webster returned to private practice as a senior partner at Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCLoy. Having been driven everywhere for decades, he was obliged to buy a map of downtown Washington simply to find his way around. He would still be called upon to sit on various legal bodies and conduct investigations into wrongdoing at the FBI. In 2018 Webster and other former CIA directors co-signed a letter condemning President Trump for revoking the security clearances of a former CIA colleague who had criticised the president's flouting of legal procedure. A year later, the 95-year-old Webster was the victim of attempted online fraud. The scammer picked the wrong man, whose perspicacity endured. Keniel Thomas was given a six-year sentence in 2019. William Webster, US federal judge and director of the FBI and the CIA, was born on March 6, 1924. He died on August 8, 2025, aged 101
