An agitated truck driver with what appeared to be a bomb strapped to his head reached speeds up to 100km/h as he led a police chase up and down a Melbourne freeway.
About 150 motorists had to abandon their cars on the Monash Freeway as the 35-year-old sped away from officers, then turned around and drove the wrong way down the major arterial road.
He eventually surrendered, after stripping naked, but not before the high-speed chase that came to an end only when he drove towards the evacuated vehicles on the freeway.
Detective Acting Senior Sergeant Martin Bourke said someone could have easily died.
"We had a number of trucks that were the first vehicles that were coming in the other direction," Det Acting Sen Sgt Bourke told reporters.
"If we had trucks going 100km/h in each direction colliding that would have caused some major, major issues.
"We probably would have had some fatalities on our hands today."
Barely half an hour elapsed between police receiving the call to attend a broken-down truck on the freeway about 4am on Thursday and the Caulfield South man's arrest.
Critical Incident Response Teams (CIRT) happened to be in the area when the call came through and were the first on the scene.
The officers who went to the truck saw a device around the man's head.
They backed off and tried to negotiate with the man, but after about five minutes he drove off.
He got about four kilometres away before he stopped, did a U-turn and drove in the direction of oncoming traffic.
Police had managed to close the freeway and evacuate motorists from their vehicles near Toorak Road.
One of the drivers told to leave their cars, identified only as Aganta, described the scene as "like a movie".
"He mentioned he's got a bomb on the back of his prime mover. And we were told to get out of the car, Aganta told Fairfax Radio.
"And now the bomb unit is there, the dog squad is there, the helicopters are there and they have a special team there. It's like a movie."
Another witness, Mick, said anybody 300 metres from the front of the queue was told they were not allowed to touch their vehicles.
The bomb squad cleared the truck and the device, which turned out not to be explosive.
The area was declared safe and the freeway reopened about 7am, in time for most of the morning peak-hour traffic.
The man was arrested and taken to The Alfred hospital for a psychiatric assessment.
He has not yet been charged.
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