President Barack Obama has said a systemic failure allowed a known extremist with explosives to get onto a US-bound plane last week.

Obama said he considered the intelligence and security failures to be "totally unacceptable".

The US needed to learn from the incident and act quickly to fix flaws in the system, he said.

A Nigerian man, with al-Qaeda links, has been charged with attempting to blow up the plane as it came in to land was restrained by passengers.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, allegedly tried to detonate explosives in his underwear, the BBC reported.

It was also reported Wednesday that the US was aware that "a Nigerian" in Yemen was being prepared for a terrorist attack - weeks before an attempted bombing on a US plane.

ABC News and the New York Times say there was intelligence to this effect, but its source is unclear.

Abdulmutallab flew from Lagos to Amsterdam before changing planes for a flight to Detroit on which he allegedly tried to detonate a bomb.

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