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President Barack Obama has ordered a review of US no-fly lists after a botched Christmas Day terror 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 are 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. Related article: Nigerians pulled to radicalism by education, poverty

But he remained off a short-list of 18,000 names from which the no-fly list of 4,000 is selected and 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."

Republican Senator Susan Collins said that following his father's warning, Abdulmutallab's visa should have been revoked, or at the very least he should have been given a physical pat-down at the airport.

"This individual should not have been missed," Collins told The New York Times. "Clearly, there should have been a red flag next to his name."

Travel jitters around the world were not helped on Sunday when anti-terrorism officers in Detroit rushed to a plane on the same route with the identical flight number after a Nigerian passenger shut himself in the toilet. Related article: Delays for holiday travellers

After interrogating the man the FBI eventually dismissed the event as a "non-serious incident," but not before Obama, on vacation with his family in Hawaii, was notified and called a new security briefing.

US counter-terrorism investigators, meanwhile, sought to determine if Abdulmutallab was acting alone or had been sent on a deadly suicide mission by Al-Qaeda.

American 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. Related article: Bomber 'trained' by Al-Qaeda 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 due to increased security measures at several airports. Related article: Fresh questions over air security

Abdulmutallab, handcuffed to a wheelchair and wearing bandages on both wrists, was arraigned Saturday at the Michigan medical center where he was treated for burns sustained while trying to detonate his device.

He was moved to a federal prison west of Detroit on Sunday and his lawyer said there would be a hearing on Monday 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.

According to The New York Times, Abdulmutallab told FBI agents he was connected to an Al-Qaeda affiliate, which operates largely in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, by a radical Yemeni cleric whom he contacted online. Related article: Al-Qaeda in focus

Given Al-Qaeda's new activities in Yemen, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against the terror network in that country, The Times reported.

Citing an unnamed former top CIA official, the newspaper said that a year ago the Central Intelligence Agency sent Yemen many field operatives with counterterrorism experience. At the same time, some of the most secretive special operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics. Related article: The London link

The Pentagon will be spending more than 70 million dollars over the next 18 months, and using teams of special forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, interior ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels, The Times noted.

AFP