Private security and Los Angeles police are increasing patrols outside Jewish houses of worship in reaction to Sunday’s attack in Boulder, where, according to police, a man using a makeshift flamethrower hurled an incendiary device into a crowd of Jewish demonstrators. Eight people were injured.
“What happened in Boulder, Colorado—an especially brutal targeting of elders—is an atrocious affront to the very fabric of our society and our beliefs here in Los Angeles,” L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement.
Bass said she would convene an emergency meeting after the conclusion of Shavuot, a Jewish holiday that began at sundown on Sunday and ends Tuesday evening. “Anti-Semitism will not be tolerated in this city,” she said.
Authorities said the attacker, identified by the FBI as 45-year-old Mohamed Sabry Soliman, targeted demonstrators with a volunteer group called Run for Their Lives, which organizes run and walk events to call for the immediate release of the Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in 2023.
The group had gathered at the Pearl Street pedestrian mall, a four-block area in downtown Boulder frequented by tourists and University of Colorado Boulder students.
Soliman was shouting “Free Palestine,” said Mark Michalek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Denver field office.
Four women and four men, ages 52 to 88, were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said. Soliman was arrested and taken to the hospital for treatment, but authorities didn’t elaborate on his injuries.
The FBI is investigating the attack as a targeted act of terrorism.
“This marks the second violent assault on Jewish and pro-Israel civilians in the U.S. in less than two weeks—a chilling escalation that cannot be dismissed as coincidence,” the L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement, referring to the slaying of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. on May 21. “Both attacks are the direct result of months of anti-Israel propaganda, moral equivocation, and silence in the face of raging antisemitism.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
