WASHINGTON: An angry President Barack Obama has lectured US spy chiefs on an intelligence “screw-up” that left a US airliner carrying 290 people open to a barely-averted Al-Qaeda attack on Christmas Day.

In a highly unusual public rebuke of the US clandestine community, Obama on Tuesday made a terse televised statement about the thwarted bombing, after gathering agency chiefs and national security aides at a high-stakes White House meeting.

Hours after his statement, Yemen police today arrested a key Al-Qaeda chief believed to be behind threats that saw several foreign missions in the capital Sanaa, including the US embassy, close their doors.

Mohammed al-Hanq had evaded arrest on Monday during a security force raid in Arhab, 40 km north of Sanaa, in which two of his relatives were killed and three other people wounded.

During the televised remarks, Obama suggested that missed “red flags” before the airliner attack were more serious than originally thought.

“It is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analysed or fully leveraged,” Obama said. “That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.” He was more explicit during the meeting in the secure White House Situation Room, an official said, calling for immediate repairs to the flawed US security system.

“This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous,” the official, speaking on condition of anonymity, quoted Obama as saying in the meeting.

“We dodged a bullet but just barely. It was averted by brave individuals, not because the system worked,” the president said, according to the official.

Obama’s sharply worded comments contrasted with some of his earlier statements on the botched attack, which had led to criticism that his response lacked a sense of urgency.

The president also announced on Tuesday that he would suspend the transfer of Yemeni detainees from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

“We will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time,” Obama told reporters at the White House, vowing however to make good on his promise to close the camp, which was one of his first official acts as president last January.

“We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda,” Obama said.

Obama said probes into the botched plot to blow up the airliner showed US intelligence missed other red flags related to Abdulmutallab, who had previously traveled to Yemen.

He said US intelligence knew that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula wanted to strike not only US targets in Yemen but in the United States itself over the holiday season.

“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,” Obama said.

“This was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.

“When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed.”