Story highlights Flight staff, passengers intercepted man, who'd been released from psychiatric care

Passenger approached the flight deck with something many feared could be a bomb

(CNN) Australian police have defended their actions after a passenger tried to force his way into the cockpit on a Malaysia Airlines flight from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur Thursday.

Just after a takeoff, a male passenger on Flight MH128 tried to enter the cockpit while holding what one passenger described as a "huge, unusual, black, metallic, strange thing... size of a watermelon."

"He was yelling 'I need to see the pilot, I need to see the pilot,'" passenger and former AFL player Andrew Leoncelli told Australia's ABC News.

The mid-flight scare ended safely, but passengers later criticized the police response which saw them sit on the tarmac for 90 minutes with what they thought could be a bomb on board, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation

"We could see them [the police] all outside, but they weren't coming on the plane and nobody knew why," passenger Selena Brown told the ABC.

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