Muslim student arrested over clock withdraws from Texas school: newspaper

[September 22, 2015]  (Reuters) - A teenage Muslim student who was arrested last week after high school staff said they mistook his homemade clock for a bomb withdrew from the school district on Monday, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, the father of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, told the newspaper that he formally withdrew his son from the Irving Independent School District, adding that he was also pulling out his two other children.

Mohamed became an internet sensation after a photo showing the bespectacled ninth grader clad in a NASA T-shirt being led away in handcuffs from MacArthur High School last Monday went viral.

"Ahmed said, I don't want to go to MacArthur," Mohamed's father told the Morning News. "These kids aren't going to be happy there."

Mohamed was accused of making a hoax bomb, handcuffed and questioned, and received a three-day suspension from the Irving, Texas high school over the clock he put together to impress his new classmates and teachers.

No charges were filed and police said they would review the decisions officers made in his arrest.

In the wake of the incident, Mohamed won widespread praise for his ingenuity and also received several invitations, including one from President Barack Obama to visit the White House.

The arrest sparked allegations of racial and religious profiling, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations called the case an example of the climate of hate and manufactured fear around the religion.

The news comes as Muslim Americans have responded with frustration, exasperation and anger to what many see as a growing wave of Islamophobia fueled by two of the Republican Party's most popular presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

Ben Carson on Sunday said that Muslims were unfit to be president of the United States, arguing their faith was inconsistent with American principles. He said on Monday that he "absolutely" stood by his comments.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Michael Perry)

[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.]

Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.