US President Barack Obama ordered a review of US terrorist watch-lists after a botched Christmas Day attack and demanded to know how a Nigerian man managed to board a Detroit-bound airliner wearing an explosive device.
The databases used by US security agencies were under scrutiny after it emerged that the man who tried to blow up a jet from Amsterdam with 290 people on board as it prepared to land in Detroit was on one of their watch-lists.
“There’s a series of databases 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 said.
The 23-year-old suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was added to a watch-list of some 550,000 names last month after his father told US embassy officials in Abuja that he was concerned by his son’s increasing radicalism.
But Abdulmutallab remained off a list of 18,000 people subject to additional security screening at airports and the no-fly list of 4,000. He flew from Lagos to Amsterdam on Christmas Eve and on to Detroit the following day with a valid US visa.
“The president has asked that a review be undertaken to ensure that any information gets to where it needs to go, to the people making the decisions,” Gibbs said. “The president wants to review some of these procedures and see if they need to be updated.”
Obama had also 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 counter-terrorism investigators were seeking to determine if Abdulmutallab was acting alone or had been sent by al-Qaeda.
US law enforcement officials, quoted anonymously by US media, have said the suspect confessed once in custody to receiving specific training for the attack from an al-Qaeda bombmaker in Yemen.
But Obama’s top security official, Janet Napolitano, said there was “no indication” Abdulmutallab was acting as part of a larger plot and warned against speculating that he had been trained by al-Qaeda.
Serious ramifications for air travel were already in evidence on Sunday with passengers complaining of lengthy delays and missed connections because of increased security measures at several airports.
Abdulmutallab was moved from a hospital to a federal prison west of Detroit on Sunday and his lawyer said there would be a hearing yesterday to address a request by the US authorities for a sample of his DNA. The suspect was not expected to attend.
The charge sheet said Abdulmutallab tried to bring down the Northwest Airlines Airbus A330 using a device containing PETN, also known as pentaerythritol.
The explosive material was allegedly sewn into Abdulmutallab’s underwear and officials believe tragedy was averted only because the makeshift detonator failed to work properly, ABC News reported.
Abdulmutallab confessed that he had mixed a syringe full of chemicals with powder taped to his leg to try to blow up the flight, according to senior officials quoted by US media.
“We really have to replace our scanning devices with more modern systems,” said Richard Clarke, a former White House counter-terrorism czar.
Clarke said full body scans were needed, “but they’re expensive and they’re intrusive. They invade people’s privacy.”
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