Obama orders review of flight security

President Barack Obama ordered a review of US no-fly watch-lists and demanded to know how a Nigerian man managed to board a  Detroit-bound airliner wearing an explosive device, even as his Homeland Security secretary conceded that the aviation security system failed when the Nigerian on a watchlist was allowed to board a fight with explosives.

The system used by US security agencies of lists that become shorter as the risk increases has come under fire since it emerged that the 23-year-old bomb suspect was on one of the terrorist data bases when he embarked on his deadly suicide mission.

"There's a series of data bases that list people of concern to several agencies across the government. We want to make sure information-sharing is going on," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told NBC news.

The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was added to one of the larger watch-lists last month after his father is said to have told US embassy officials in Abuja that he was concerned by his son's increasing radicalism.

The suspect, whose father is a prominent Nigerian banker, remained off the no-fly list of just 18,000 names and was able to retain his US visa issued in 2008 and fly from Lagos to Amsterdam on Christmas Eve and on to Detroit the following day.

Obama had ordered a second review to examine how "an individual with the chemical explosive he had on him could get onto an airliner in Amsterdam and fly into this country", Gibbs said.

US investigators are trying to piece together any terrorism connections of Abdulmutallab, who was charged on Saturday with attempting to blow up the jetliner after reportedly confessing that he had been trained by al-Qaida in Yemen.

But Obama's top security official said on Sunday there was "no indication" that Abdulmutallab was acting as part of a larger plot and warned against speculating that he had been trained by al-Qaida. "This was one individual literally of thousands that fly and thousands of flights every year. And he was stopped before any damage could be done," US Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano said. Napolitano conceded on Monday that the aviation security system failed when the man on a watchlist with a US visa in his pocket and an explosive hidden on his body was allowed to board a fight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

A day after saying the system worked, Napolitano backtracked, saying her words had been taken out of context. "Our system did not work in this instance," she said. "No one is happy or satisfied with that. An extensive review is under way."