US President orders review of ‘no fly’ lists after bomb threat aboard Detroit-bound plane

United States President Barack Obama has ordered a review of the ‘US no-fly watch-lists.’

He also demanded to know how a man from Nigeria managed to board the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to Detroit, the United States, carrying an explosive device.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters that there are a series of databases that list “people of concern” to several agencies across the government and that the United States Administration wants to ensure that sharing of information continues.

The list of the “people of concern” – which is used by several security agencies of the United States – has become shorter and the risk has become greater, according to security experts. To substantiate their point, the experts point to the incident on Christmas Day when Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian youth, aged 23, managed to board the flight carrying with him an explosive device on his suicide mission.

In fact, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab had been added to one of the bigger watch-lists in November 2009, after his father, a prominent banker in Nigeria, reportedly told the officials of the United States embassy in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, that he was “concerned” by his son’s “increasing radicalism.”

Since he had been taken off the ‘no-fly list’ of just 8,000 names, Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to get a US visa and so fly from Lagos to Amsterdam, the Netherlands,  on Christmas Eve and then on to Detroit on Christmas Day.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama has ordered a second review to find out as to how an individual carrying a chemical explosive had managed to board a scheduled airliner in Amsterdam and fly into the United States.

Meanwhile, investigators in the United States arte trying ascertain whether the suspect, Abdulmutallab, has any links to terrorism.

Abdulmutallab has been charged with attempting to blow up the plane after he is reported to have confessed he had been trained by the terror outfit Al-Qaeda in Yemen.

However, United States Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the country’s top security official, told CNN in an interview that there has so far been no indication that Abdulmutallab was acting as part of a larger plot.

Janet Napolitano also warned against speculating that Abdulmutallab had been trained by Al-Qaeda, adding that the suspected youth was one of the hundreds of thousands of people who fly in thousands of flights each year and that he was “stopped” before he could do any damage.

Abdulmutallab is being treated at the University of Michigan Medical Center for the burns he suffered while trying to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight, which carried 290 people on board.

Preliminary analysis conducted by experts of the US Federal Bureau f Investigation (FBI) found that the device Abdulmutallab used contained pentaerythritol (PETN), a substance with high explosive capability.

It is reported that the PETN was sewn into Abdulmutallab’s underwear.

Officials believe that a big mishap was averted only because the makeshift detonator that the man used failed to work properly.