#IStandWithAhmed: Obama, Zuckerberg and social media rally around Muslim teen detained because of homemade clock

On Monday, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed’s high school teachers and principal in Texas mistakenly thought he had a homemade bomb at school and called the police.

Ahmed ended up in handcuffs.

On Wednesday, President Obama invited the ninth-grader, a budding engineer, to the White House. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to meet him. And Twitter users started a hashtag — #IStandWithAhmed — to show their support for the teenager.

Yeah, that’s a pretty memorable week.

Ahmed, who likes to work with electronics, was proud of the homemade clock he took to school on Monday. But when an English teacher though it looked like a bomb, the principal and police questioned Ahmed before police escorted him from school in handcuffs. They thought the clock was a hoax bomb.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said the clock was “certainly suspicious in nature.” He said Ahmed was handcuffed “for his safety and for the safety of the officers,” and taken to a juvenile detention center. He was later released to his parents, Boyd said.

And he was suspended from school for three days.

“The follow-up investigation revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment, and there’s no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm,” Boyd said.

Ahmed told the Dallas Morning-News that he’s loved robotics since middle school and wanted to pursue that interest in high school. So he built the clock to show his new high school teachers what he could do.

He said he made the clock in about 20 minutes on Sunday before he went to bed. The Morning-News described the clock as a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display. It was strapped inside a case decorated with a tiger hologram on the front.

Ahmed said his teachers thought, “How could someone like this build something like this unless it’s a threat?”

Support for him began pouring in as the story of his mistaken arrest made the rounds.

On Wednesday, President Obama tweeted: “Cool clock, Ahmed. We should inspire more kids like you to like science.”

“That’s how you respond to a 14-year-old who builds an exciting project on his own time and brings it to school to show off what he made,” wrote Vox. “You show him that creativity opens doors, that having passion and making things are a path to opportunity and excitement. You tell him that even the president is excited by what he has to offer this country.”

Scores of others tweeted their support, some even trying to score Ahmed a trip to NASA since he was wearing a NASA shirt when he was handcuffed.

Zuckerberg weighed in on a Facebook post.

“Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Ahmed, if you ever want to come by Facebook, I’d love to meet you. Keep building.”

Overwhelmed by the response, Ahmed had his own message for his supporters.

This story was originally published September 16, 2015 at 3:01 PM with the headline "#IStandWithAhmed: Obama, Zuckerberg and social media rally around Muslim teen detained because of homemade clock."