Who killed Harry Potter? Is it Rowling or one of his best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger? No one knows the about the real murderer, but the hacker named ‘Gabriel,’ claims to have taken a digital copy of author J.K. Rowling’s seventh book, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,’ by flouting into a computer at Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. The computer hacker posting claims that what he said were key plot details regarding the mysterious ending of the fictional British boy wizard Harry Potter’s saga but the publisher warned that details could be false.

The hacker, Gabriel has posted information at Web site InSecure.org that would answer that question. Gabriel said,

We make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring.

However, a Bloomsbury spokesperson declined to say anything on the hacker’s claims. And Kyle Good, a spokesperson for U.S. distributor Scholastic Corp., didn’t confirm that the posting was correct but he warned readers not to believe anything on the Web that claims to have inside information on the book’s plot. She said,

There is a whole lot of junk flying around. Consider this one more theory.

David Perry, a rep for computer security company Trend Micro, said that Gabriel’s claim could be a hoax. He said,

We’ve had hypes like this on the last couple of Harry Potter books. There is a very high level of spurious information in the hacker world.

Even the stolen copy of the sixth Harry Potter novel ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’ surfaced in Britain about month before its official release in July 2005, and two people were charged who were reportedly trying to sell a copy to the London tabloid The Sun. Four ‘Harry Potter’ movies made by Warner Bros. film studio, a division of Time Warner Inc., have brought in $3.5 billion in global ticket sales, and a fifth film is due in theaters in early July.

The ‘Harry Potter’ books have been global best-sellers with 320 million versions sold worldwide, and anticipation for ‘Deathly Hallows’ is high. In April, U.S. retailer Barnes & Noble said advance orders for the book had already topped 500,000 copies, setting a chain record. Scholastic plans to release a record 12 million copies of ‘Deathly Hallows’ to meet demand.

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