A Maltese woman who was on an Air Malta plane where a man started praying in the aisle recounted the 45-minute ordeal and called on the airline to invest in handcuffs.

Maria Busuttil, 60, said a burly Caribbean man in his early 30s put all the passengers on edge on Tuesday when just before take-off from London Heathrow he left his seat, knelt down in the aisle and started bellowing the Our Father in English.

Ms Busuttil, who has been living in Middlesex for the past five years, had just had surgery and said the incident was the last things she needed after the plane had already been delayed for hours because of the heavy snow.

“When my husband got on the plane and sat near me, he told me there was a man chanting Christian prayers on his knees in the passenger bridge leading to the aircraft,” she said.

The couple thought nothing more of it until after the seatbelt check, when the plane began taxiing and the same man got moved onto the aisle, prompting the purser to ask him to return to his seat.

The man, who had dark skin and dreadlocks, was holding an orange Sainsbury’s plastic bag, which some passengers feared could have contained some sort of explosive.

“He didn’t want to take his seat. He was on his knees, shouting ‘Our Father who art in heaven’, as if he were a preacher... It was like he was saying his last prayer before he dies... it was very scary.”

When the man did not comply with the purser’s instructions, the captain decided to return to the terminal and the cabin crew tried to hold the man down until the police arrived.

“Then he got hold of the purser, grabbing him as tight as anything. He was wiping his nose in his hand and wiping it on the purser’s clothes.”

Eventually, six armed British police officers came on board and the man started to bite them until they managed to get him out of the plane together with family members accompanying him.

Ms Busuttil said the Air Malta crew handled the situation extremely well but added they should have been equipped with handcuffs, which could have put passengers’ minds at ease when the man became aggressive.

“What if he did what he did when we were already in the air?”

Ms Busuttil, who is in Malta for the holidays, said the only lucky part of the incident was that Heathrow opened its second runway soon after the passengers were brought off the plane and a security check on the plane was made.

“We were meant to fly in the morning but the flight was delayed to 3.30 p.m. because of the weather. Thankfully, we got another slot and left at about 7 p.m. If the second runway didn’t open we would have been there till 5 a.m. the next day.”

An Air Malta spokesman said the man “required medical attention”, adding he posed no actual risk to passengers. “But we had to take precautions,” the spokesman said.