The family of the Colorado firebombing suspect, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, has been taken into custody by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Tuesday.

Soliman, an Egyptian national, came to the US on a tourist visa in 2022. He stayed after the visa expired and was in the US illegally, the department has said.

He lived in Colorado Springs with his wife and five children.

Investigators accuse Soliman of injuring 12 people when he attacked a support rally for Israeli hostages in Colorado on Sunday using a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails.

“Today, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are taking the family of suspected Boulder, Colorado, terrorist and illegal alien Mohamed Soliman into ICE custody,” Noem announced on X.

“Mohamed’s despicable actions will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but we’re also investigating to what extent his family knew about his horrific attack, if they had any knowledge of it or if they provided any support,” she said.

Soliman entered the country in August 2022 on a tourist visa that expired in February 2023, according to Tricia McLaughlin, spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security. She said Soliman filed for asylum in September 2022 and was granted a work authorization in March 2023, but that also expired. The department did not respond to requests for additional information or about how he obtained a work permit.

According to state court documents, Soliman previously lived for 17 years in Kuwait.

Witnesses said Soliman, 45, threw the homemade firebombs into the crowd while shouting “end Zionists.” Eight people were burned or caught on fire, and four victims with minor injuries later came forward.

Soliman also used a commercial weed sprayer, mounted on his back and filled with gasoline, as a makeshift flamethrower. The device malfunctioned and caught on fire, prompting Soliman to drop the sprayer and remove his shirt, witnesses later said.

The suspect, who was lightly injured, told medical personnel that he attacked the group to avenge “his people.”

The rally was to call for the release of 57 people who have been held hostage in the Gaza Strip since they were abducted on October 7, 2023, during the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and triggered the ongoing war in Gaza.

Soliman told investigators he planned the attack for a year and waited until his daughter graduated from high school, then carried out the firebombing three days later. He told police his family did not know of his plans.

Soliman said he left an iPhone with messages to his family hidden in a desk drawer at his home. His wife has turned over an iPhone to investigators.

Authorities have said the family is cooperating with the investigation.

The overstay rate for Egyptians on business or tourist visas was four percent in 2023, well below some of the biggest offenders such as Chad (49%), Laos (34%), and Sudan (26%).

Immigration court records are not public, and the status of Soliman’s asylum case is unclear.

Egyptians had an asylum grant rate of 72% during the 12-month period through September 2024, compared with 45% for all nationalities, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Antisemitic, pro-terror US activists have shared videos purportedly showing the suspect in the Colorado firebombing attack urging followers toward further violence, the Anti-Defamation League said Tuesday.

The videos were posted on an Arabic-language Telegram channel called Taufan al-Ummah that has 30,000 followers. The name of the channel translates to “Flood of the Muslims” and refers to Hamas’s October 2023 onslaught in Israel, which is referred to as the “Al-Aqsa Flood” by the Palestinian terror group.

On Monday, the channel shared two videos that purported to show suspect Soliman immediately before the attack. The channel claimed to have received the video from a private source who is “close to the hero.”

The ADL said the videos have not been verified and should be treated with suspicion, although the underlying purpose — stoking terrorism and antisemitism — is clear.

In one of the clips, Soliman said in Arabic: “God is greater than anything. Greater than the Zionists, greater than America and her weapons, greater than F-35 fighters, greater than everything.”

In another video, Soliman said: “For my mother, my wife, my children, my sister, my family. I bear witness for Allah and for you, in Allah and his prophet, and for love of Jihad that is greater than the love of you, the world, and everything in it, and with faith in Allah.”

Another post in the channel said, in reference to the Colorado attack: “With the simplest tools, you can inflict a heavy toll on the accursed Zionists and seek forgiveness before God. And you can contribute to the nation’s flood that has begun.”

One member of the Boulder, Colorado, city council refused to sign onto a statement condemning the firebombing attack against the rally because it called the attack antisemitic, and not anti-Zionist.

“I could not sign into the joint letter because my request to add the anti-Zionist to the antisemitism attack sentence or the word anywhere in the document was denied,” council member Taishya Adams wrote on Facebook.

“I cannot sign a letter that equates the calls for a ‘Free Palestine’ with antisemitism. Without the anti-Zionist part, the reader will fail to understand a key driver of this terrible attack,” she wrote. “Also, the perpetrator, whose actions I condemn fully and that resulted in harm to our community members, was explicit about ending Zionism.”

The US city’s statement called the firebombing a “targeted, antisemitic attack.”

“We cannot – and will not – allow antisemitism to become normalized here,” the statement said.

Adams is the “sister city liaison” between Boulder and the Palestinian West Bank city of Nablus.

A member of the hostages’ advocacy group in Boulder has previously accused Adams of anti-Jewish discrimination, including by blocking the hostages’ group on her official Instagram account.

Before the attack, the Boulder city council was repeatedly disrupted by anti-Israel protests, prompting a Jewish council member to say she felt unsafe at the meetings, according to Boulder Reporting Lab, a local news site.

The rally incident, which the FBI said it was investigating as an act of terrorism, marked the second major attack against a Jewish gathering in the US in recent weeks after two Israeli embassy staffers were shot and killed outside an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC on May 21.