A 14 year-old boy wanted to impress his engineering teacher by building a digital clock. But instead of winning the science fair, Ahmed Mohamed was met with five police officers at his Texas high school.
He was interrogated, searched and arrested. He was led in handcuffs to a juvenile detention centre.
Following the media fanfare, many are claiming that Islamophobia is alive and well in Dallas.
Ahmed's hobby - building radios and repairing go-karts - has left him feeling like "I wasn't human. It made me fee like I was a criminal."
When the clock beeped during Ahmed's English class, his teacher remarked that it looked like a bomb.
He claimed he had made a clock.
I couldn't tell you what a bomb looks like (or a homemade clock for that matter). But the authorities should. Obviously any threat of terrorism has to met with swift action, yet it seems to me that the response in this case - five police officers - would probably not have been quite so heavy handed, had the boy's name not been Mohamed.
Instead of a robotics award or even an official apology, Ahmed was slapped with a three-day suspension.
“He just wants to invent good things for mankind," said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed. "But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”
At no point did Ahmed make a threat. Hashtags in support of the teen - #IstandwithAhmed and #helpAhmedmake - have taken off on social media.
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