The US had enough information to disrupt the alleged Christmas Day bomb plot but failed "to connect the dots", Barack Obama has admitted.
The American President said the failures which allowed Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab to attempt to set off a bomb on board a plane bound for Detroit were "not acceptable" and would not be tolerated.

US spy agencies and the State Department had information about the 23-year-old Nigerian but he was never put on a no-fly list.

Mr Obama spoke after a meeting with his national security team, where he described the failures as "a screw up that could have been disastrous".

He told the government officials who have conducted two reviews into the incident: "We dodged a bullet but just barely. It was averted by brave individuals not because the system worked and that is not acceptable."

Speaking afterwards he added: "The bottom line is this - the US Government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots.

"In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had."



Alleged bomb plot suspect

He added: "When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way."

Mr Obama pledged to find out why the failures had occurred and correct them to avoid future attacks.

Sky's White House commentator Jon-Christopher Bua said the president was "visibly irritated and containing his steaming anger" as he spoke.

He said: "President Obama took a no-nonsense, the-buck-stops-here approach, accepting the responsibility for the failure of the government under his watch.

"What was missing was some message of assurance that the administration had already figured out how to keep this from occurring again."

Bua said Mr Obama's promise to share the results of the review with the public will provide yet another opportunity for the Republicans to attack the administration.