Texas teen arrested over homemade clock gets it back days before leaving US

The Texas teenager who made headlines around the world when he was arrested for making a clock that teachers mistook for a possible bomb has got his device back from the police – just days before he and his family are due to leave the US for Qatar.

“Got my clock back finally!!” Ahmed Mohamed, 14, posted on Twitter on Friday evening after taking back possession of the homemade science experiment that put him at the centre of a furore in September.

Police in Irving, Texas, on the outskirts of Dallas, had held Ahmed’s clock in an evidence bag.

The 14-year-old visited the White House on Monday, on the invitation of President Obama, but was not able to take his clock with him, as the president asked, because it was in custody.

That was also where Ahmed found himself after he was arrested without being read his rights and taken away in handcuffs after his school called the police. Several members of Congress have called on the Department of Justice to investigate.

Ahmed, then a new student at MacArthur high school, got into trouble after he showed his clock device, wired together in a large metal pencil case, to his teachers.

After pictures of Mohamed with his hands cuffed behind his back and wearing a Nasa T-shirt went viral, Obama invited him to bring his clock to the White House.

But just 24 hours after a triumphant visit to Washington, the Mohamed family announced he had been offered scholarships for school and college in Doha, Qatar. He, his parents and siblings will leave the US next week, with no plans to return.

Ahmed had expressed a desire to attend MIT and work for Nasa, and would likely have had his pick of a number of top universities across the US. But now he is moving to Qatar, pulled by a lucrative offer and pushed not just by the trauma of the arrest but by the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant attacks on him and his family that followed.

“This has destroyed the whole family, you know,” Mohamed’s uncle Aldean Mohamed told the Dallas Morning News. “We are here for 30 years. We love Irving and want to be in Irving but this is their choice [to leave].”

Ahmed attracted widespread support and expressions of outrage over his arrest, but also attacks from conspiracy theorists and conservative commentators.

“All the crazy things. There is a fear of all those comments,” Aldean said.

Congressman Mike Honda, the Democratic representative for Silicon Valley, hosted a press conference on Capitol Hill with Ahmed on Tuesday morning.

“This incident highlights an alarming trend of profiling Muslim Americans not only by law enforcement but in all of society as a whole, and I think we call that Islamophobia,” Honda said.

He invited Ahmed to visit Silicon Valley and a Nasa center in California, and tweeted: “He’ll make a fine engineer one day.”

Ahmed posted on Twitter a picture of himself hugging Obama and said what an honour it was to have met the president. But he has also said he did not think any of his classmates would have been arrested as he was and said he was routinely treated like a foreigner and subjected to anti-Muslim and racial prejudice in Irving.

Ahmed was born in Sudan, which he visited the week before he attended the White House event.

In Texas, his school suspended him for three days after his arrest, even though charges were dropped. Neither the school nor police have apologised or expressed regret.

Ahmed said on Friday police were pleasant when he picked up his clock, but mainly just stared at him. A Dallas Morning News reporter, Avi Selk, posted a picture on Twitter of Ahmed holding up the evidence bag which held his clock. The label could clearly be read: “Hoax bomb”.

“Or it’s a clock,” Selk tweeted.