A broken toilet forced a Malaysia Airlines Berhad (MAB) plane to make an unscheduled landing in eastern India today, a company spokesperson said.

The MH19 flight landed safely in Chennai before taking off for Kuala Lumpur mid-morning, she said.

“This was a flight diversion, not an emergency landing, as the lavatories were required to be fixed,” she told dpa by email, without specifying the nature of the problem.

The flight was servicing the same route from Amsterdam as ill-fated MH17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, although the flightpath has been changed to avoid the conflict area.

Also in 2014, the Malaysia Airline’s Beijing-bound flight MH370 disappeared about an hour after it left the Kuala Lumpur on March 8.

- dpa