A Muslim teenager arrested after a Texas teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb won invitations to the White House, Google and Facebook on Wednesday in a surge of public support.
US President Barack Obama congratulated Ahmed Mohamed, 14, on his skills in a pointed rebuke to school and police officials — who defended his arrest — amid accusations of Islamophobia.
“Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great,” Obama tweeted.
Photo: AFP
A photograph of Mohamed standing in handcuffs, wearing a T-shirt with the US space agency NASA’s logo was retweeted thousands of times in a matter of hours and “#IStandWithAhmed” became the top trending hashtag on Twitter.
Mohamed told the Dallas Morning News that he hoped to impress teachers by taking the clock to school on Monday.
“My hobby is to invent stuff,” the teenager said in a video posted on the newspaper’s Web site, filmed in his electronics-filled bedroom.
“I made a clock... They took it wrong, so I was arrested for a hoax bomb,” he said.
The son of Sudanese immigrants who live in a Dallas suburb, Mohamed loved robotics club in middle school and was hoping to find something similar at MacArthur High School. He did not get the reaction he hoped for when he showed the clock to his engineering teacher.
“He said: ‘That is really nice. I would advise you not to show any other teachers,’” Mohamed said.
When the clock’s alarm went off in another class, the teacher told him it looked like a bomb and confiscated it. The school called police and Mohamed was taken away in cuffs amid suspicion he intended to frighten people with the device.
Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said that Mohamed’s ethnicity had nothing to do with the response.
“Our reaction would have been the same either way. That is a very suspicious device,” Boyd said.
A photograph provided by police showed a flat, rectangular red digital clock face screwed into the dark plush interior of a silver case along with a circuit board and some wires.
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