Mohamed listened, keeping the clock in his bag, until the alarm beeped in English class. He said he showed his teacher the invention later, and she said it looked like a bomb and kept the clock.
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President Obama used Twitter to invite the Texas teen to bring to the clock he created to the White House.
Police said they don’t think the device was unsafe, but don’t believe Mohamed told them everything.
Hooper said CAIR, America’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization, would be following up with school officials and police to determine how to prevent a similar incident from occurring again, and how to fix the student’s reputation. But, we both know you’re enterprise software guy at heart.
Well, at the very least, Irving, TX police came to their senses and are not pressing charges against the student.
Ahmed Mohamed, 14, was arrested after his teacher mistook the timepiece for an explosive device.
“We were doing everything with an abundance of caution”, Weaver said.
Obama wasn’t alone. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the account for Google’s online global science competition both sent invites to Ahmed, showing their support for his interest in technology.
Twitter user Whitney Merrill shared a photo of a watch and a NASA shirt similar to the one Mohamed was wearing when he was arrested.
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“He just wants to invent good things for mankind”, Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, told the newspaper.
Police officers insisted Ahmed gave “passive aggressive” responses when questioned and was unable to give a “reasonable answer” about his briefcase, which held the clock. “The future belongs to people like Ahmed”, Zuckerberg wrote on his personal Facebook page. And they told me, ‘Why would you bring a clock to school?’ And I was like to tell time. “Do we take him into custody?”
President Barack Obama and other government officials also expressed support for Ahmed through the social media.
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Asked at the press conference if the teen’s religious beliefs factored into his arrest, Chief Boyd said the reaction “would have been the same” under any circumstances. The family of Ahmed Mohamed said the boy was suspended for three days from the school in the Dallas suburb.
