The wife and five children of the man charged with carrying out a terror attack on Boulder’s Pearl Street mall last year have been released from immigration custody, their attorney said in a social media post Thursday.
The family’s release comes days after a federal judge ordered them freed from the detention facility in Dilley, Texas, where they had been held for 10 months. Immigration authorities detained Hayam El Gamal, the wife of Mohamed Soliman, and the couple’s five children soon after Soliman was arrested in the June 1 terror attack in Boulder.
Soliman is accused of using a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to burn people who’d gathered on the popular pedestrian mall for a weekly demonstration urging the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Witnesses said Soliman shouted, “Free Palestine” during the attack, which is being prosecuted in both state and federal court. Karen Diamond, 82, died on June 25 from injuries sustained in the attack.
Soliman, who was born in Egypt and lived in Kuwait for 17 years, arrived in the U.S. in August 2022 on a tourist visa that expired in February 2023. He overstayed his visa and sought political asylum in September 2022. He and his family settled in the Colorado Springs area.
When Soliman’s family was detained two days after the attack, then-Homeland Security Secretary Noem vowed online that the family would be deported “as early as tonight.”
Instead, they were held in custody until their release this week, according to the family’s attorney, Eric Lee. He did not immediately return a request for more information Friday and it was not clear exactly when El Gamal and her children were freed.
