Texas student arrested for homemade clock school thought to be a bomb

Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old student at Irving MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, loves to build and repair things at home. On Monday, he decided to take his homemade clock, made inside a pencil case, to school. But instead of impressing his teachers, they called police and he was arrested.

According to The Dallas Morning News, the clock is still sitting in an evidence room as police consider charging him with making a hoax bomb. Right now, Ahmed is suspended from school.

Ahmed told the Morning News that he first showed it to his engineering teacher, who was impressed. However, the teacher told him not to show it to any other teacher. At first, he decided to listen to the advice and kept it in his bag. But then the alarm went off during English, so he had to show it to the teacher.

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” Ahmed recalled. “I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”

The teacher kept the clock. The principal and a police officer then took him out of another class. Ahmed was taken to another room where four police officers he had never seen before were waiting. One officer said, “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.” And then Ahmed was suddenly aware of his skin color and name.

While officers questioned him, Ahmed insisted that it was just a clock. Even police spokesman James McLellan told the Morning News that Ahmed never said it was a bomb. However, McLellan said that Ahmed didn’t give a “broader explanation.”

Police sent him to a juvenile detention center, where his parents picked him up after he had his fingerprints taken. But Ahmed was still suspended from school for three days.

“He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, told the paper. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”

“This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving’s government entities are operating in the current climate,” Alia Salem of the Council on American-Islamic Relations added. “We’re still investigating... but it seems pretty egregious.”

The situation caught attention on Twitter, with users posting the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed, notes The New York Times.

screenshot from Dallas Morning News YouTube video

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