Freed flawed chess genius heads for new life in Iceland
Chess legend Bobby Fischer landed in Denmark for a brief stopover today on the journey to his new home, Iceland, after being released from nine months in a Japanese detention centre.
Fischer, the first passenger to emerge from the Tokyo flight, did not even glance at a crowd of reporters gathered inside the Copenhagen terminal. Two police officers ushered him and his fiancee down a staircase and into an unmarked van.
They were set to board another flight to the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik.
Earlier, Fischer – sporting a long beard and wearing a baseball cap – walked free from a Japanese detention centre following a nine month stand-off with Tokyo officials trying to deport him to the US.
Before leaving, the eccentric genius offered a few parting shots to the leaders of Japan and the US, whom he accused of “kidnapping” him.
“I won’t be free until I get out of Japan,” he said at Tokyo airport. “This was not an arrest. It was a kidnapping cooked up by Bush and Koizumi,” he said, referring to President George Bush and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
“They are war criminals and should be hung,” he said in an apparent criticism of the US-led war in Iraq.
Japanese officials released the chess icon today after taking him into custody in July, when he tried to leave the country using an invalid US passport.
Fischer, 62, arrived at Tokyo airport characteristically defiant, accompanied by his fiancee, Miyoko Watai – the head of Japan’s chess association – and Iceland’s ambassador to Japan, Thordur Oskarsson.
As he walked toward the airport entrance, he turned, unzipped his trousers and acted like he was going to urinate on the wall. He called Japan’s ruling party “gangsters.” Fischer, whose mother was Jewish, also said he was being hounded by the US because it is ”Jew-controlled.”
Fischer claims his US passport was revoked illegally and sued to block a deportation order to the US, where he is wanted for violating sanctions imposed on the former Yugoslavia by playing an exhibition match against Russian Boris Spassky in 1992.
This week, Iceland’s Parliament stepped in to break the stand-off by giving Fischer citizenship. Iceland is where he won the world championship in 1972, defeating Spassky in a classic Cold War showdown that propelled him to international stardom.
Moving to Iceland does not necessarily mean Fischer has beaten Washington’s effort to prosecute him. Iceland, like Japan, has an extradition treaty with Washington.
A federal grand jury in Washington, meanwhile, reportedly is investigating possible money-laundering charges involving Fischer, and he may face tax-related charges as well.
Fischer was reported to have received about £2 million from the competition in the former Yugoslavia, and boasted then that he did not intend to pay any income tax on the money.
Fischer became a chess icon when he dethroned Spassky in a series of games in Iceland, claiming the US’ first world chess championship in more than a century.
But he gave up the title a few years later to another Soviet, Anatoly Karpov, by refusing to defend it. He then fell into obscurity before resurfacing to play the 1992 exhibition rematch against Spassky in the former Yugoslavia.
Fischer won the rematch. But his playing violated US sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic. If convicted, Fischer – who hasn’t been to the US since then – could face 10 years in prison.
Though generally a recluse, Fischer has emerged from silence in radio broadcasts and on his Web page to express anti-Semitic views and rail against the US.
