The government created a record on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in November 2009 in the intelligence community's central repository of information on known and suspected international terrorists, but there was not enough negative information to put him on a no-fly list, a U.S. administration official said on Saturday.

There are 550,000 individuals contained in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment repository, where a record of Abdulmutallab was created.

There was not enough negative information to include his name in a subset of that group, the Terrorist Screening Data Base (TSDB) that has more than 400,000 individuals and is the main identities database within the U.S. government for international terrorism, the official said.

Less than 4,000 of the names in the TSDB are on the No Fly list and another 14,000 names are on the Selectee list, which calls for mandatory secondary screening, the official said.

There was insufficient derogatory information available on the subject at that time to include him in the TSDB or its 'no fly' or 'selectee' lists, the official said. Thus, he was not watchlisted as of 25 December 2009.

Security Terrorism