Obama Invites Muslim Student and His Clock to White House

President Barack Obama has praised the engineering ingenuity of a Muslim schoolboy who was detained after the homemade clock he brought to school was mistaken for a bomb.

In a tweet Wednesday, Obama said the clock was "cool" and invited 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed of Irving, Texas, to the White House.

Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.

— President Obama (@POTUS)September 16, 2015

Police in the Dallas suburb cuffed Mohamed Monday and brought him to a juvenile detention center after school officials reported a "hoax bomb."

The handcuffs were "for his safety and for the safety of the officers," Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said Wednesday. The teen has been suspended for the last three days.

"The follow-up investigation revealed the device apparently was a homemade experiment, and there's no evidence to support the perception he intended to create alarm," Boyd said.

This is the photo of — Robert Wilonsky (@RobertWilonsky)September 16, 2015

Boyd defended the actions of administrators and officers, saying: "We live in an age where you can't take things like that to school…Of course we've seen across our country horrific things happen, so we have to err on the side of caution."

No charges will be filed against the teen, the police chief said.

School district spokeswoman Lesley Weaver said administrators took action because they were worried about student safety, and that the decision to call police had nothing to do with Mohamed's Muslim faith.

"We were doing everything with an abundance of caution to protect all of our students in Irving," she said.

The incident shot Mohamed to instant online fame, with many posting messages of support to the teen, accompanied by the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also lauded Mohamed's "skill and ambition" and invited him to his company's headquarters.

"I was really mad," Mohamed later told the Dallas Morning News after his release. "I was like, 'Why am I here?'"

The teen later retweeted the president's message on his own Twitter account.