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#IStandWithAhmed: Obama, Zuckerberg support arrested teen

Rappler Social Media Team

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#IStandWithAhmed: Obama, Zuckerberg support arrested teen
Teachers thought the 14-year-old boy's homemade clock was a bomb so they had him arrested

MANILA, Philipines – A Muslim teen was led out of a Texas school in handcuffs after a teacher mistook his homemade digital clock for a bomb, prompting accusations of Islamophobia and an online backlash Wednesday, September 16.

A photo of Ahmed Mohamed, 14, standing in handcuffs while wearing a T-shirt with the US space agency NASA’s logo was retweeted thousands of times.

Mohamed told The Dallas Morning News that he was just trying to impress his teachers when he brought the clock to MacArthur High school on Monday.

“My hobby is to invent stuff,” he said in a video posted on the paper’s website that was filmed in his electronics-filled bedroom.

“I made a clock. It was really easy. I wanted to show something small at first… they took it wrong so I was arrested for a hoax bomb.”

Mohamed, who had loved robotics club in middle school and was hoping to find something similar in high school, said he didn’t get the reaction he was looking for when he showed the clock to his engineering teacher.

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,'” Mohamed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.'”

But the alarm went off during his English class, and his teacher told him it looked like a bomb and confiscated the clock.

The school called the police and Mohamed was taken away in handcuffs amid suspicion that he intended to frighten people with the device.

The aspiring inventor, who lives in Irving just outside Dallas, said police would not let him call his parents during a lengthy interrogation. Once released, he was suspended from school for 3 days.

Police said that they have determined that Mohamed had no malicious intent and it was “just a naive set of circumstances.”

“We’re not going to pursue this any further,” Irving police chief Larry Bond told reporters.

For people online, however, what happened was unacceptable. In a matter of hours “#IStandWithAhmed” became the top trending hashtag on Twitter.

Netizens were angry at the way the young inventor was treated.



No less than US President Barack Obama and other leaders chimed in: 



To show solidarity, people started bringing clocks from home to work:






Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg posted a message for Ahmed:

You’ve probably seen the story about Ahmed, the 14 year old student in Texas who built a clock and was arrested when he…

Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Ahmed was wearing a NASA shirt when he was arrested. How cool is it that NASA astronauts and experts started asking him out via Twitter?








He got an invite to Google Science Fair:


While Twitter and Reddit offered him an internship:



Follow the hashtag here:


Mohamed’s family launched a Twitter account Wednesday to thank his supporters using @IStandWithAhmed as his handle. 



What are your thoughts on the incident? – Rappler.com with reports from AFP

 

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