Obama orders review of air security measures

United States President Barack Obama has ordered a review of air security measures after a Nigerian youth carrying explosives managed to sneak into a transatlantic American jet.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that Obama wanted to know how a man carrying explosives had managed to board the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas day without being detected.

Obama also called for "a review to figure out how an individual, with the chemical explosive he had on him, could get on a plane in Amsterdam and fly into the United States," Gibbs told NBC on Sunday.

"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," he said amid reports that the 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was on a US 'security watch list' after his father alerted authorities about  is behaviour.

Gibbs said Obama is receiving regular briefings from his national security staff about the incident. Abdulmutallab, who had claimed to have links with the Al Qaeda, was on a broad watch list of 550,000 names since November, he said.

That list does not automatically bring tighter screening of individuals, he said, and Obama has ordered a review of the procedures for determining which people on the list undergo more stringent checking.