Just a thought on this:
This has happened to Peter twice on the same airline with the same device. It's perfectly reasonably assumed by him that they have been stolen by somebody at some point on the journey. The only thing we know for sure is that it has been removed and that, maybe significantly, the accompanying leads have not.
I fly well over 100k miles a year, much of it transatlantic. I often don't have checked bags so all my stuff is in carry-on and I have all the usual electrical devices (phone. iPad, laptop etc..). It's not uncommon for those items to be removed and inspected at security. That usually involves a few standard questions about whether they belong to me, recent repairs and where I bought them, The outcome is always that they have a look and then they're handed back to me and all's well.
It's a very different scenario when electrical items are identified in checked bags. I would imagine that the vast majority of bags don't have them inside and, when they are seen, they're probably frequently inspected. Without the owner present, they can't ask questions so if there's any doubt whatsoever, such as whether it had been placed in an unlocked bag by somebody other than the owner, they would almost certainly (and probably rightly) remove it.
As I said above, it might be significant that the lead isn't removed because, if they were in the same bag/box, I would think it was likely that a thief would take both because the risk of detection (the key factor for a thief) is the same. I think a security agent would see the leads as not presenting a risk so would leave them in the bag,
I can't definitively support this theory but it doesn't seem far-fetched when I think about it.
No consolation to Peter of course and you would hope that a note would be left if items were legitimately removed but I wonder if this really is a case of theft.
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