Texas 9th-grader arrested after taking homemade clock to high school

Ahmed Mohamed, who lives in Irving and has a keen interest in robotics and engineering, put the device together on Sunday night.

Ahmed tells the Morning News he had hoped to impress an engineering teacher with his homemade clock, made with some simple electronics and a Vaultz pencil case. The Irving, Tex., ninth grader has a talent for tinkering – he constructs his own radios and once built a blue tooth speaker as a gift for his friend – and he wanted to show his new teachers what he could do. Things got even worse when his invention got confiscated during the English class because the alarm started beeping.

Perhaps some of his teachers should be suspended so they can spend a little time working out what the difference between a digital clock and a bomb is.

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup”.

Ahmed felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name-one of the most common in the Muslim religion. In sixth period, the school principal came for Ahmed with a police officer in tow, arresting him and marching him out of school.

“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’ I told them no, I was trying to make a clock”. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation”.

The Irving School District has made no public comment on the matter.

“She was like, it looks like a bomb”, he told the Dallas News, adding, “It doesn’t look like a bomb to me”.

NBC-DFW reported that a police report released Tuesday cites a “hoax bomb” incident, listing three MacArthur High teachers as complainants against Mohamed.

It could reasonable be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a auto.

“This all raises a red flag for us – how Irving’s government entities are operating in the current climate”, said the chapter’s leader, Alia Salem. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of September 11, I think my son got mistreated”.

Ahmed’s father, longtime Irving resident Mohamed Elhassan Mohamaed, is a native of Sudan and has run for president of that country twice, including this year.

Mohamed’s story has also caught attention of the Council for American-Islamic Relations, who consider this abuse an act of Islamophobia. Father and son reportedly plan to meet with the principal and the police chief on Wednesday.