SCHOOL AUTHORITIES IN Texas have been criticised after a 14-year-old Muslim boy was taken from class in handcuffs – after building an electronic clock.
Ahmed Mohamed says his hobby is “to invent things”, so when he made a simple electronic clock, he brought it into school to show his engineering teacher.
When the clock beeped during his English class, he showed it to his teacher. She thought it looked like a bomb and alerted authorities.
The Dallas Morning News reports that Ahmed, who is a member of the school’s student council, was taken to a room by a police officer and the school principal.
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. That’s who I thought it was.”
He says that police officers said the clock, which was strapped inside a metal pencil case “looked like a movie bomb”.
A police spokesperson told the paper that the clock could have been mistaken, but that Ahmed had never claimed the device was anything other than a clock.
“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”
Ahmed was then led from the school in cuffs by two officers and taken to a juvenile detention centre.
He was suspended from school for three days by his principal, who wrote a letter to parents defending the school and reminding parents to tell children not to bring “prohibited items” to school.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the case “raises a red flag”. The incident prompted a wave of tweets, with the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed trending in the US.
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