There's been a happy ending to the story of Trinity College Dublin student Jamal Sulaimani, after he left his MacBook with his thesis on it in a taxi last Friday night.

Thanks to a shout-out from Harry Potter author, JK Rowling, the case was brought to Newstalk's attention. The bag containing the laptop was returned to Jamal on the Moncrieff show.

Newstalk put out bids to Dublin taxi companies to look out for the missing laptop.

A relieved Jamal poses with the bag containing his laptop, complete with all of the notes for his PhD thesis 

Thankfully, the taxi driver Aziz Khan found the laptop and returned it. Khan's wife, Sharon, heard about the story when JK Rowling's tweet took off in the Irish media. She reached out and contacted Jamal directly on Facebook, with a bag of popcorn in his rucksack proving a major turning point.

Sharon had noticed the snack food in the bag, connecting it to some of the information included in a Facebook post about the contents of the rucksack. 

Jamal said "I had the back-up, and I just missed that one back-up with the work from the corrections, which is ultimately not great for anybody because you need to do it again. But it was the worry of having to buy another laptop, having to do that work again, being out of the lab and not doing all the experiments I have to do... It's great to have this back again."

Jamal joined Sean Moncrieff live in Newstalk's Dublin studios today to recount his week of worry and relief. Listen back to that interview in the podcast below: