Police chief Diego Rojas said the man was angry because his suitcase was not returned.

Rojas said the man "planned a flight that left his suitcase" and the the bag was not returned.

The man, "annoyed with the companies and with the entire air traffic control system, would have made these calls to make things complicated," Rojas said.

The suspect, Franco Sepulveda Robles, was arrested in the northern Chilean city of Antofagasta on Friday and was being taken to the capital of Santiago to begin legal proceedings, police said.

The incident took place Thursday when multiple airliners were forced to make emergency landings or turn back to their original airports in Chile and Peru.

The flights were operated by LATAM Airlines and Chile-based Sky Airlines.

One of the affected flights was LATAM Airlines flight 800, which went from Sydney to a stopover in Auckland before heading on to Santiago, where it performed an emergency landing.

Victor Villalobos Collao, the director of Chile's civilian aviation authority, said a total of 11 threats had been received, but two flights did not exist and "a procedure" was carried out with respect to nine of them.

He did not say what the procedure consisted of and said no explosives had been found.

The threats were made by telephone to a ticket counter, a LATAM operations center in Colombia, and to civil aviation authorities.

Another LATAM flight made an unscheduled landing in the southern Peruvian city of Pisco while two Sky Airlines flights returned to their departure city of Santiago.

Other planes had already reached their destination or had not yet taken off.

Interior Minister Andres Chadwick said Sepulveda or anyone else involved could be charged with security law infringement, which carries a penalty of up to five years.

Australian Associated Press