Off-the-cuff joke or real threat?
Sikh boy arrested for allegedly threatening to blow up Dallas school
It’s déjà vu in the Dallas suburbs.
Three months after “clock boy” Ahmed Mohamed’s homemade gadget was mistaken for an explosive device, another minority student in a neighbouring community has been arrested for allegedly making a bomb threat at school.
The 12-year-old Sikh boy, Armaan Singh, was arrested on Dec. 11 for allegedly threatening to blow up Nichols Junior High School in Arlington, Texas. He was handcuffed, held in a juvenile detention centre for three days and suspended from school.
But Singh says he is innocent, and that it was another student who caused the whole mess by mistaking his backpack for a bomb.
“I thought it was just a joke, so I started laughing and then he started laughing, too,” Singh said of the accusation during an interview with the Dallas Morning News. “The next thing you know, I’m reading with my friend and police come in, grab me and take me outside.”
Singh’s family has levelled accusations of “discrimination” against the school and police, and demanded the charges be dropped.
“It hurts my heart and boils my blood that there are people stupid enough out there (to be) not only accusing us, but our innocent children of being terrorists!” wrote Singh’s cousin, Ginee Haer, in a Face- book post that quickly went viral this week. “It sickens me even more that there are people even more stupid out there, taking their word for it.”
Police and school officials, however, insist that they acted appropriately in the face of a bomb threat — one of a string of such threats in the Dallas area in recent months.
Arlington Police say that Singh confessed to telling a fellow student that he had a bomb in his backpack.
“People have got to learn they cannot make these types of threats, which cause alarm, which cause evacuations,” police spokesman Lt. Christopher Cook told the Morning News. “Just because you say it’s a joke, it doesn’t get you out of trouble.” As in the Ahmed Mohamed case in September, the school district says that it’s prevented from discussing the case in detail by student confi- dentiality rules. But the Arlington Independent School District (AISD) defended its decision to call in the cops.
“The AISD will do what is necessary to maintain the safety and security of its students, and we are confident that our actions are appropriate in all respects,” a district spokeswoman told the Morning News.
There are a number of parallels between Singh’s arrest and those surrounding Mohamed in Irving, Texas, earlier this year. The two cities near Dallas neighbour one another, and the circumstances of their arrests are similar.
Mohamed, 14, is Muslim. Singh is Sikh, a separate religion common in his parents’ native India. Because of their turbans and beards, however, Sikh men are sometimes confused for Muslims.
In the United States, Sikhs have come under increasing attack amid a rise in xenophobia and anti-Islam violence.
Like Mohamed, Singh had recently started class at a new school after his family moved from San Antonio to Arlington in August.
And while Mohamed is an aspiring scientist — he was arrested in a NASA T-shirt — Singh also dreams of asimilar career as a mechanical engineer.
The trouble began Dec. 10. Singh had just finished a history test when he opened his backpack to put away his things. Singh’s backpack is a “power bag,” he told the Morning News, which means it has a battery at the front to charge a cellphone.
“The student in front of me, who is the one who made the accusation . . . said that (the backpack) looked like a bomb,” Singh said. “Then Friday. . . I came back to that period and he was in front of me again and he said, ‘I’m going to go tell on you. I’m going to go tell on you and say all this stuff about you. I’m going to go tell on you.’ ”
Singh said he laughed at the other student, who did the same. But the other student — who Singh’s cousin Haer called “a bully” — reported the incident to their teacher.
“The police came in and they grabbed me and they just took me outside in the hallway, made me wait, and then our class was getting out, then they took me to the police officer’s office,” he told the Morning News. “Then they talked to me and asked me questions. Then they took me to the department of the police, then the juvenile centre.
“I was really scared, really nervous,” he added.