Alex Watts,
Sky News Online

President Obama has attacked the “systemic failure” in his own intelligence service that nearly cost 300 lives in the skies of Detroit.

Obama strongly criticised blunders in the intelligence community

The US leader held a hastily-arranged press conference in Hawaii on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s alleged attempt to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

He said the 23-year-old Nigerian should never have been allowed to board a US-bound plane after concerns were raised about his extremist views.

Mutallab’s own father had warned about his son in recent weeks, and this information had been passed to US security officials – but was not properly distributed among American agencies.

“Where our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have so that this extremist boarded a plane with dangerous explosives that could have cost nearly 300 lives, a systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable,” Mr Obama said.

“We need to learn from this episode and act quickly to fix the flaws in our system because our security is at stake and lives are at stake.”

Mutallab is a former engineering student at University College London

He said two security reviews were now in place in the US – one governing terror watch lists, and the other air travel screening.

“It’s essential we diagnose the problems quickly and deal with them immediately,” he added.

Mutallab is said to have told US agents there are more people “just like him” ready to carry out future attacks.

An al Qaeda group based in Yemen has claimed responsibility for the failed attack and Mr Obama has pledged to hunt down the plotters.

Photographs apparently showing Mutallab’s underpants filled with explosives have been broadcast around the world.

The American government pictures show the singed underwear with a six-inch packet of a high explosive called PETN apparently sewn into the crotch.

He was reportedly carrying about 80g of PETN – more than one-and-a-half times the amount carried by “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in 2001 – and enough to blow a hole in the side of an aircraft.