President Obama has said that a "mix of human and systemic failure" allowed a terror suspect to board a US airliner on Christmas Day even when the intelligence community had information that should have triggered "red flags".

Information on the Nigerian suspect, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, should have been sufficient to alert authorities to prevent him from getting on the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, he said in a brief statement Tuesday during his vacation in Hawaii.