Clock mistaken for bomb
September 16, 2015
Ahmed Mohammed, a teenager who says he enjoys playing around with electronics, took what he described as a clock he made at home to his school, MacArthur High, on Monday, expecting his engineering teacher to be impressed. Instead, the teacher advised him to not show his invention to any other teachers.
The teenager kept his clock in a bag during English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of the lesson. When he showed his invention to her, "She was like, it looks like a bomb," Ahmed said. The teacher kept the clock and Ahmed was later taken away by the principal and a police officer.
"They interrogated me and searched through my stuff and took my tablet and my invention and later I was taken to a juvenile detention center, where they searched me, took my fingerprints and mugshots of me and they searched me until my parents came," Ahmed told the "Dallas Morning News" paper.
Police did not believe the device was dangerous, but said it could be mistaken for a fake explosive. Ahmed has been suspended for three days from school, but no charges have been filed against him. Local police spokesman James McLellan said his team didn't believe Ahmed was telling them the whole story.
Ahmed said police were charging him of making a "movie bomb." "It didn't make me feel like I was human. It made me feel like I was a criminal," the schoolboy told Dallas News.
Support from the president
His father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, an Islamic activist who immigrated from Sudan, said about his son, "He just wants to invent good things for mankind… But because his name is Mohamed and because of September 11, I think my son got mistreated."
Meanwhile, support has been pouring in for the 14-year-old on Twitter, with US President Barack Obama calling Ahmed an inspiration.
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton posted this tweet on her account:
Many users were also quick to point out Ahmed's arrest as yet another case of racial profiling.
Pebble, the smartwatch manufacturing company, asked if its business was reason enough for police to arrest its employees.
mg/msh (AP, dpa)