Student inventor arrested after teacher thought his homemade clock was a bomb

A US student who made a homemade clock and took it to school has been arrested after his teacher and police thought it was a bomb.

Ahmed Mohamed, 14, is a teenage inventor who makes his own radios and repairs go karts.

He hoped to impress his engineering teachers at MacArthur High in Irving, Texas, with a homemade clock he took to school on Monday in his pencil case.

Instead, the school phoned the police and he was detained and questioned.

He kept the clock in his bag but the alarm beeped in the middle of an English lesson.

He told Dallas News: "She was like, it looks like a bomb.

"I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’"

Irving police spokesman James McLellan said they have no reason to think the device was dangerous.

Asked to clarify, the spokesman told Dallas News:

“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”