A 14-year-old Texas high school student was arrested on Monday after his teachers mistook a harmless digital clock he made for a bomb.

Ahmed Mohamed took the clock, a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, to MacArthur High School in Irving to show his engineering teacher his skill with technology. As the Dallas Morning News reported, the Muslim student was subsequently pulled out of his sixth-period class and led into a room where four policemen waited.

"They were like, 'So you tried to make a bomb?'" Mohamed recalled the conversation with one of the officers. "I told them no, I was trying to make a clock. He said, 'It looks like a movie bomb to me.'"

Officials handcuffed the boy and led him out of the school to a juvenile detention center. Mohamed was fingerprinted, released into the custody of his parents and suspended from school for three days, the newspaper detailed. 

Police spokesman James McLellan insisted that the student's clock "reasonably be mistaken as (an explosive) device."

"The concern was: What was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?" McLellan explained. but "we have no information that he claimed it was a bomb, (and) he kept maintaining it was a clock; but there was no broader explanation."

Ahmed's father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, said it was an injustice that his son was arrested because of his inventiveness, ABC News noted. 

"He just wants to invent good things for mankind," the elder Mohamed said. "But because his name is 'Mohamed' and because of (the) Sept. 11 (terrorist attacks), I think my son got mistreated."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Muslim civil liberties advocacy organization, said it was reviewing the incident but called the "heavy-handed response" on the part of authorities "suspicious" and "pretty egregious."

"This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving's government entities are operating in the current climate," Alia Salem, the executive director of the council's North Texas chapter, contended in a statement posted to social media.

In a show of support, social media users have started tweeting with the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed.