KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 24 — A six-year-old Maltese terrier on the Malaysia Airlines flight which was diverted to Alice Springs on January 18 had to wait for four days and spent the night in an Australian airport before it was finally reunited with its owner.

According to Australian news portal ABC News, Timothy was on board flight MH122 which was diverted to Alice Springs due to technical difficulties last Thursday.

The portal reported that the rescue dog was travelling on his first-ever flight from Sydney via Kuala Lumpur to London, where his family was relocating.

“My worst nightmare was that he’d just been left in a hold crate on the runway with no access to food or water,” Timothy’s owner Susan Merrell said.

Merrell said that she was travelling with her family on a different airline, and that Timothy’s immigration paperwork was stuck on the original plane undergoing repairs in Alice Springs.

As a result, Timothy had also missed the connecting flight from Kuala Lumpur to London.

“The whole plan was that he would arrive at Heathrow at 5:35am and that our flight would land at 11:30am. We could have gone straight to the plane to pick him up, but of course things didn’t turn out that way,” she added.

After four days and more than 17,000km of travel, authorities released the dog from Heathrow Airport’s quarantine centre and it was reunited with Merrell.

“He was actually quite emotional, he was shaking, he was crying and yelping, but I think overall he was just really excited to see us and we were to see him too,” she was quoted saying.

In a separate news report, The Star Online quoted Malaysia Airlines as saying that Timothy was never left unattended.

In news reports of the incident last week, passengers on board the plane were quoted as saying they were frightened, with one claiming that the crew appeared “nervous and clueless” after a loud noise emanating from an engine forced the diversion.

Another complained that passengers were not informed of the matter for up to 15 minutes after the episode began.

Malaysia Airlines’ safety record has been under added scrutiny after Flight MH370 vanished in 2014 en route to Beijing, while MH17 was also shot down over Ukraine the same year.