Passengers tackle ‘drunk’ man who threatened to blow up flight
AN AIRLINER was forced to return to Melbourne airport last night after a passenger reportedly threatened to detonate a bomb 20 minutes into its flight to Kuala Lumpur.
The man attacked an air hostess soon after the Malaysia Airlines flight took off, then tried to enter the cockpit.
Witnesses said he shouted “I’m going to blow up this plane”, before he was tackled by passengers and crew, who tied him up with seat belts.
Andrew Leoncelli, a former Australian football player who was on the plane, told The Age newspaper that the man was carrying a large, black cylindrical object which looked like a speaker with an on/off switch. He said the man was “screaming” at the air hostess that he “needed to see the captain”. “I’ve got a bomb and I’m going to f–––––– blow the plane up,” Mr Leoncelli quoted the man as saying.
Another passenger told Australia’s 3AW radio: “I could hear this idiot saying that he wanted to go in and see the pilot. The staff were saying ‘sit back down sir, sit back down sir’. He goes: ‘No, I’m not going to sit back down – I’m going to blow the plane up’.”
Abdul Aziz bin Kaprawi, Malaysia’s deputy transport minister, said the man appeared to be drunk and: “It was not a bomb but a powerbank [charger]”.
Malaysia Airlines, which is still recovering from two major disasters three years ago, stressed that its Flight MH128 was not hijacked and landed back at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport at 11:41pm, 30 minutes after take off.
Armed security officers boarded the plane, removed the disruptive passenger and escorted the other passengers back to the departures hall.
In 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, with 239 people on board, went missing on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The Boeing 777 has yet to be found. A few months later, Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard, including 10 Britons.