Pearl Street Mall Attack and Boulder King Soopers Shooting: Similarities and Differences

The June 1 assault on Boulder's Pearl Street Mall against demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages taken at the outset of the Israel-Hamas war shares some characteristics with the massacre at a nearby King Soopers on March 22, 2021. But there are significant differences, too, including the weapons used by the attackers and the fallout from their choices.

The most important distinction involves the fate of the victims in the two incidents. Twelve people, most of them elderly, were hurt this past weekend, but none of their injuries are currently considered life-threatening, although some were critical. In contrast, ten people were killed at the King Soopers branch, including a Boulder police officer.

Both attackers are of Middle Eastern descent. Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, who was arrested and subsequently charged with a hate crime for the Pearl Street Mall offense, is a citizen of Egypt who reportedly moved to Colorado Springs three years ago after spending the previous seventeen years in Kuwait; his American visa expired in 2023. As for King Soopers shooter Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, the 26-year-old was born in Syria but moved to the United States at age three and subsequently became a U.S. citizen.

Despite Alissa's legal status and long stint in the states, many commentators on social media and beyond immediately assumed that his onslaught on innocent grocery shoppers was a terrorist act — and this notion persisted even after Alissa's attorneys revealed that he was a schizophrenic who struggled with mental illness. Many of the tweets that surfaced in the days after the shooting relied upon familiar racial slurs — "Turns out that Boulder shooter was a raghead," one message read — while others castigated the press for reporting early witness assertions that the shooter was white and failing to note that his ten victims were Caucasians. And then came the theory that Alissa decided to launch a murderous spree to punish the United States for the bombing of a Syrian site a few weeks earlier that was supposedly used by Iranian-backed militia outfits.

By the time of Alissa's trial, such theories had long since been debunked. In September 2024, a jury rejected his not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity plea and convicted him for ten murders and hundreds of other violations, resulting in a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. But he wasn't prosecuted for terrorism.

In all likelihood, this sequence of events convinced the Boulder Police Department to wait until all the facts were in before branding the Pearl Street Mall attack an act of terror — a cautious approach not exhibited by FBI Director Kash Patel and others in the federal government. But this time around, the details that surfaced made it clear Soliman had indeed gone after the demonstrators in question for political reasons. He told authorities that his intent was to kill all "Zionists" and that if given a second chance, he would be just as homicidal against members of Run for Their Lives, a group that has been calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Hamas since 2023 and has been holding silent walks along Pearl Street.

These declarations only fueled more attempts by opinion-mongering X users to portray Soliman as typical of everyone with his presumed Islamic faith. Some examples of online anti-Muslim hate the Alissa reactions: that echoed the Alissa reactions: "Yes, you should be monitoring everyone with this first name;" "WAIT— his name is...Mohamed? #Shocking #Boulder #BoulderAttack #Islam" and "When will America learn? Islam is incompatible with Western Civilization." See more below.

Yes, you should be monitoring everyone with this first name.

"Mohamed Soliman: The Boulder terror attack suspect accused of firebombing pro-Israel rally in Colorado"#Colorado #coloradoattack #Terrorism #Islam #Jihad

— Mike Harding ☕️ (@BigToePolitics) June 2, 2025

Mohamed Soliman firebombed Jews in Boulder, Colorado.

When will America learn? Islam is incompatible with Western Civilization.

Anyone who's pro-Palestine should be arrested, stripped of their rights, and sent to Gaza.

We don't have to tolerate this. And we shouldn't. Enough!

— James (@thebasedyankee) June 2, 2025

The attack at the Boulder King Soopers was so lethal because Alissa was armed with a Ruger AR-556 pistol — essentially a more compact version of an AR-15 rifle, the firearm of choice for many mass shooters hoping to inflict maximum damage. Hence, much of the public reaction to the mayhem involved calls for gun-law reforms that would restrict or ban the sales of such hardware. See the following collage of images from the memorial that sprang up around the store in the wake of the violence for examples.
In contrast, Soliman deployed Molotov cocktails and a gasoline-filled weed sprayer against the Pearl Street Mall protesters. But his criminal affidavit reveals that these tools were far from his first choice. An excerpt notes: "Mohamed searched YouTube and learned how to make Molotov cocktails. Mohamed said he had to use Molotov cocktails after he was denied the purchase of a gun due to him not being a legal citizen. Mohamed said he took a concealed carry class where he learned to shoot a gun, but that all changed after he was denied the purchase."

These comments would seem to offer a public-relations opportunity to supporters of Colorado gun laws, which are much tougher than in many states and have routinely stood up to court challenges by Second Amendment diehards who think they're unconstitutional. After all, dozens of people could have been killed on the Pearl Street Mall had Soliman been armed with an automatic weapon rather than flammable liquid. But thus far, progressive politicians fearful of minimizing the severity of the latest Boulder attack have been reluctant to try to score political points with such an argument.

True, Colorado Representative Jason Crow briefly mentioned guns in the context of the Pearl Street Mall incident during a June 3 appearance on CNN. But the previous night, during a conversation with CNN's Erin Burnett, Colorado Governor Jared Polis pivoted away from such an argument, as seen in this section of the program's transcript:

BURNETT: You know, what's your reaction when you hear the he tried to get a gun, and I mean to only imagine how horrific this would have been if that were the case, that the only reason he was not successful in doing so was because he was here illegally.

POLIS: Well, look, I mean, certainly to a certain extent, it shows that gun-safety laws work. We have universal background checks in Colorado. We're grateful he didn't get a gun.

But I want to keep the focus on the victims as we encourage them and pray for their recovery, as well as on the important message that antisemitism. Anti-free speech through violent means has no place in the United States of America. And we need to unequivocally condemn it, regardless of the specifics of any particular case.

The gun issue could grow in importance over time, as could plenty of other tangential matters related to what happened June 1 on the Pearl Street Mall — because the prosecution of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, like that of Boulder King Soopers shooter Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, will take not months, but years, to reach anything resembling a resolution.

Here's Soliman's Colorado arrest affidavit:

Mohamed Sabry Soliman Colorado Affidavit by Michael Roberts on Scribd