Mentally-ill man threatens to detonate a bomb on a Malaysia-bound flight

A Malaysian Airlines flight carrying 337 passengers was travelling from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday when panic ensued.

Travellers were only ten minutes into their journey when a mentally-ill passenger stated that he had a bomb. He seemed to be carrying some sort of electronic device at the time. When he tried to enter the cockpit, passengers took to wrestling the man, eventually constraining him.

Malaysia Airlines #MH128: SBS have spoken to those onboard, who say a “passenger holding a device was tackled by 11 other passengers”

— Alex Macheras (@AlexInAir) May 31, 2017

The device he was carrying later proved to be a portable music player. Nonetheless passengers on board were extremely frightened as the men was shouting that he was going to blow up the plane. The 25-year-old Sri Lankan man had recently been discharged from a psychiatric hospital in Melbourne and was travelling on a student-visa. According to Independent.ie, Victoria’s State premier Daniel Andrews warned against governments responding to these kinds of incidences in a negative way. “We don’t want to be stigmatising any more than mental illness already is stigmatised… We want to be very careful not to be driving people away from getting the care they need.”

Armed law enforcement have boarded Malaysia Airlines flight #MH128 after a security incident at Melbourne Airport.

Photo credit - TBA pic.twitter.com/HaAFdz9GVv — Brendan Grainger (@S118869) May 31, 2017

The plane was forced to return to an Australian airport where passengers were forced to remain onboard for up to 90 minutes while emergency services searched for potential bombs or other threats. Thankfully, nobody was harmed.