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Ahmed Mohamed is a boy in Irving, Texas who was suspended from school and detained by police for bringing a homemade alarm clock to school. In September 2015, Mohamed, then a 14-year-old freshman at MacArthur High School, was taken into custody by police, handcuffed and transported to a detention facility, fingerprinted, and suspended from school after bringing a home-assembled digital clock to show it to his engineering teacher. The case sparked debates on racial profiling and Islamophobia, and Mohamed received expressions of support from many sources, including U.S. President Barack Obama, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and retired astronaut Chris Hadfield.

Background
Mohamed comes from a Muslim family and is the son of Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, an immigrant and entrepreneur from Sudan who has twice sought to be elected the Sudanese president.

Arrest
Mohamed, a 14-year-old freshman at MacArthur High School, assembled a clock at his home. As the Dallas Morning News characterized it, "Ahmed's clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front."

On September 14, 2015, he brought the clock to school to show it to his engineering teacher. His teacher, upon seeing the clock, said, "That's really nice," but advised him to keep the device in his backpack for the rest of the school day. However, the clock later beeped in his English class, and the teacher requested to see it. The English teacher then said "Well, it looks like a bomb. Don't show it to anyone else". Mohamed closed it with a cable, later saying it was cause I didn't want to lock it to make it seem like a threat, so I just used a simple cable so it won't look that much suspicious." The English teacher reported him to the school principal's office, and the police were called. The principal and a police officer then took him out of class and led him to a room where four other officers were waiting. After interrogating him for about an hour and a half, he was taken into custody for "possession of a hoax bomb", escorted out of the school in handcuffs, taken to a juvenile detention center, and fingerprinted, before being released to his parents.    According to Mohamed, he was not allowed to contact his family during the questioning and he was threatened by the principal with being expelled unless he would sign a written statement. Mohamed was also suspended from school for three days. Even after releasing him, the police refused to accept that he only built the device as a clock and did not intend it to appear to be a bomb, saying, "He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation."

State law dictates that it is illegal to possess a "hoax bomb" with an intent to "make another believe that the hoax bomb is an explosive or incendiary device" or to "cause [an] alarm or reaction of any type by an official of a public safety agency or volunteer agency organized to deal with emergencies." Although Mohamed was never formally charged with any crime, many of his supporters have speculated that his interrogation and subsequent transfer by police to a juvenile center for processing is an example of Islamophobia in the United States. Others, such as Wall Street Journal commentator James Taranto, have said Mohamed's mistreatment is not uncommon; he points to a similar story from 2001 in New Jersey, in which a nine-year-old boy was suspended for a week and received a year of probation for creating a fake bomb. The town of Irving has reportedly had a long history of Islamophobia and racial profiling.

The Clock
On September 17, engineer Anthony DiPasquale said on his blog he believed Mohamed's clock to be a "factory-produced clock" originally made by Radio Shack. On September 18, Thomas Talbot, an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California, posted a YouTube video where he analyzed the clock. He said that Mohamed "never built a clock" but removed the plastic case from a commercial alarm clock and put it into a pencil case.

Reactions
After the initial report by The Dallas Morning News caught his attention, tech blogger Anil Dash created a form online for people to send supportive messages and thoughts on how to encourage Mohamed's creativity. Dash was among the earliest to widely publicize the story about Mohamed through social media to his more than 500,000 Twitter followers, in addition to being first to tweet the photo of Mohamed handcuffed while wearing a faded NASA T-shirt. Within hours, the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed began trending on Twitter and Dash had received thousands of responses.

Mayor Beth Van Duyne defended the actions of the police and the Irving Independent School District, stating that they were following the procedure set when a potential threat of criminal act is discovered. The MacArthur High School stated that Mohamed was welcome to return after the completion of his three-day suspension but defended its actions.

Following the incident, Mohamed received support from President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Mark Zuckerberg. President Obama wrote on Twitter, "Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great", and Zuckerberg invited him to the headquarters of Facebook. Ahmed and his family announced that he was going to the White House for an annual Astronomy Night, in which he would have the opportunity to meet other aspiring young scientists. Google invited him to attend its science fair, urging him to bring the clock along; when he arrived he "received a warm welcome, touring the booths and taking pictures with finalists." Twitter offered him a chance to intern with them. Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield invited Mohamed to his science show in Toronto. According to social analytics site Topsy, close to a million people sent out tweets with the supportive hashtag #IstandwithAhmed in less than 24 hours.

George Takei, the Japanese-American actor who played Sulu on Star Trek, penned an open letter to Mohamed, offering his support and comparing the cause of being taken into custody by police to the same mindset that lead to the Japanese internment in the United States during World War II.

Biologist-author Richard Dawkins accused Mohamed of staging a hoax by referring to the clock as an invention, writing on Twitter and citing a video and blog by an engineer who reverse-engineered Mohamed's clock that photographs of the clock showed that he took apart a clock and rearranged its parts in a pencil case without changing their function – and speculating that Mohamed's intention may have been to get arrested. He said "If the reassembled components did something more than the original clock, that's creative. If not, it looks like hoax". However, Dawkins also maintained from the beginning that Mohamed should not have been arrested. Dawkins later said that his concerns stemmed from his impression that Mohamed was claiming to have "invented" the clock, but that "it's possible he doesn't know the meaning of 'invention.

On his show, Bill Maher said Ahmed deserves an apology but that his clock "looks exactly like a fucking bomb", and also suggested that someone should say to Mohamed that "maybe one of the reasons why it happened to you is that in our religion we're responsible for 9/11, the Madrid bombing, the London bombing, the Bali discotheque bombings, the Kenya mall ..."

Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Andrew Napolitano similarly said that Mohamed and his parents may have committed a "purposeful hoax" by referring to the clock as an invention, and that electronic experts have said the clock looks similar to a 1980s clock sold by Radio Shack.

Mohamed and his family were also invited to the headquarters of the United Nations at New York City because officials from the United Nations wanted to speak with him.

On September 18, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, Ahmed's father, announced that Ahmed will not be returning to MacArthur High School, saying that Ahmed would instead wither transfer to a private school or be home-schooled. The family has since withdrawn all of their children from schools in the Irving Independent School District, and the father said the recent events emotionally affected his son, who was not eating well and having trouble sleeping. He said "It's torn the family and makes us very confused". While many schools have offered to enroll Ahmed, his father said he wants to give the boy some time before making a decision.

Criticism of laws and stereotypes
In a debate among Presidential candidates of the Republican Party, Bobby Jindal said that he did not think that a 14-year-old should ever get arrested for bringing a clock to school but defended the police who were "worried about security and safety issues". Gawker compared the situation to various other instances of students bringing homemade clocks to school and not receiving any punitive action, as well as incident in 2002 when a student made an inert bomb and carried it to school but was not suspended.

Techdirt writer Tim Cushing wrote that the Texas "hoax bomb" law Mohamed was accused under was too loosely worded, as a mere reaction by a public safety official was enough to fall under it (regardless of whether he had intentionally meant to do so), and that it could theoretically apply to other legitimate devices (such as phones and road flares) because they can "cause alarm or reaction of any type" from a public safety officer. At the same time, he wrote that the school itself may have also violated the same law, as they presented the clock to police as potentially being an explosive device.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that the incident "is a good illustration of how pernicious stereotypes can prevent even good-hearted people who have dedicated their lives to educating young people from doing the good work that they set out to do", and that Ahmed was invited the White House South Lawn for Astronomy Night on October 19.

Terri Burke, Executive Director of the ACLU of Texas, stated, "Islamophobia, and probably racism, certainly played a role in Ahmed's ordeal, but the fact is overzealous administrators, zero-tolerance policies, and law enforcement officers ill-equipped to deal with schoolchildren have compromised educational environments throughout the country. [...] Ahmed suffered through a terrifying, traumatizing, and unjust ordeal. Yet because of the mass exposure of what he endured, he's received invitations to the White House, Facebook headquarters, and the Google science fair. [...] For too many others – the ones whose stories won't go viral – the possibility of the American nightmare remains too real."