U.S. probes al Qaeda involvement in jet incident

Northwest Airlines and Delta passenger planes are seen at Detroit Metropolitan airport in Romulus, Michigan December 26, 2009.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda involvement is a "subject of investigation" in Friday's incident in which a Nigerian man has been charged with trying to blow up a U.S. passenger jet bound from Amsterdam to Detroit, U.S. homeland security chief Janet Napolitano said on Sunday.

Presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs, appearing on ABC's "This Week," also said the White House is reviewing U.S. security watch list policy.

The U.S. government created a record of 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab last month in the intelligence community's central repository of information on known and suspected international terrorists, a U.S. official said on Saturday. But there was not enough negative data to put him on a "no-fly" list, the official said.

Asked whether al Qaeda was involved in the incident, Napolitano also told ABC's "This Week" program, "That is now the subject of investigation, and it would be inappropriate for me to say and inappropriate to speculate. So we will let the FBI and the criminal justice system now do their work."

Gibbs said the administration was reviewing "how can we revise watch-listing procedures going forward to ensure that there is no clog in the bureaucratic plumbing of information that might be gathered somewhere going to the very highest levels of security in government."

(Reporting by Corbett Daly, editing by Vicki Allen)