Potter book launch to help search for missing Brit girl

LONDON: Bookstores selling the eagerly anticipated seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series will be asked to display posters of a missing British girl, and the books will come with appeals to help search for her.    

Fans of the bespectacled boy wizard will likely be waiting in line in bookstores around the globe to receive their copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", which is expected to break records and become an instant best-seller when it is released on Saturday.   

Author J.K. Rowling has requested that bookstores in more than 200 countries where the Potter book will go on sale be given posters of four-year-old  Madeleine McCann who has not been seen since she went missing from her family's holiday apartment in a Portuguese resort on May 3.   

"I fervently hope that posters displayed prominently in shops all over the world when the new book comes out will help find Madeleine McCann and will help raise the profile of the many other missing children in different countries," said the author, who has also pledged money towards a reward fund.   

Madeleine's father Gerry McCann meanwhile told reporters in southern Portugal Monday that he and his family were grateful to Rowling for her support, adding that all the new Potter books themselves would be accompanied with a picture of his daughter and a yellow ribbon bearing a message of appeal for help to find her.