Irving 9th-grader Muslim Accused Of Making A Bomb When He Took Home-Made Clock To School

On Monday, a young inventor found that his idea had bombed. Ahmed Mohamed, who rigs up his own radios and go-karts brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High, hoping to impress his teachers, according to dallasnews.

However, the scared teachers just contacted the police about the circuit-stuffed pencil case.

It was then a goodbye to the student council meeting and a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. The school put his clock in the evidence room. The cops might just charge him with making a hoax bomb.

The 14-year-old has been suspended, and the council is examining him closely.

There is a box full of circuit boards at the foot of Ahmed's bed in central Irving.

"Here in high school, none of the teachers know what I can do," Ahmed said, fiddling with a cable.

Ahmed has always been a robotics lover since middle school, and tried to continue with his love in high school.

Ahmed's clock was just hastily assembled in 20 minutes before he went to bed: "a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front".

His engineering teacher, though, did not show him the reaction he wanted.

"He was like, 'That's really nice,'" Ahmed said. "'I would advise you not to show any other teachers.'"

So he kept the clock in his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm rang in the middle of the class. Later, Ahmed took the clock to show her.

"She was like, it looks like a bomb," he said.

"I told her, 'It doesn't look like a bomb to me.'"

So the teacher kept it, and later he was pulled out of the class by a teacher and the police officer. They led Ahmed into a room with four other cops. An officer he had never seen just leaned back and murmured: "Yup. That's who I thought it was."

While Ahmed felt awkward about his name and religion, the officer just kept on throwing questions at him.

 "They were like, 'So you tried to make a bomb?'" Ahmed said.

They just kept rummaging around his belongings, and throwing questions at him.

"I told them no, I was trying to make a clock."

"He said, 'It looks like a movie bomb to me.'"

Police spokesman James McLellan admitted that Ahmed said it was only a clock, yet they did not believe him fully.

"We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb," McLellan said. "He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation."

"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 escorted out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., with his hands behind him and officers on either side, according to vox. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor - the one "who knows I'm a good boy."

His fingerprints were taken and he was then sent to meet his parents.

Ahmed did not go back to school. His family said the principal suspended him for three days.

"They thought, 'How could someone like this build something like this unless it's a threat?'" Ahmed said.

"He just wants to invent good things for mankind," said Ahmed's father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president. "But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated."

The father had once hit the news headlines when he was debating about a Florida pastor who burned a Quran.

"This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving's government entities are operating in the current climate," said Alia Salem, who directs the council's North Texas chapter and has spoken to lawyers about Ahmed's arrest.

"We're still investigating," she said, "but it seems pretty egregious."

Meanwhile, Ahmed is sitting home in his bedroom, tinkering with old gears and electrical converters. One thing is clear---he is never going to take another invention to school.