Updated:
11:37 a.m. ET March 7, 2005TOKYO - Chess grand master
Bobby Fischer has been placed in solitary confinement at
a Japanese immigration detention center for four days
after a fracas with guards at breakfast, his fiancee and
ex-bodyguard said on Monday.
The former world chess champion is fighting deportation
from Japan to the United States, where he is wanted for
violating sanctions against Yugoslavia by playing a
chess match there in 1992. He has been in custody in
Japan since he was arrested last July for traveling on
an invalid U.S. passport.
Fischer’s fiancee, Miyoko Watai, a four-time Japan
women’s chess champion who last year announced plans to
marry Fischer, said he told her during a meeting on
Monday morning that he had been in solitary confinement
from last Wednesday to Sunday morning at the detention
center in Ushiku, northeast of Tokyo.
‘A bit of trouble with some of the staff’
“There was a bit of trouble with some of the staff,”
Watai said at a news conference.
Watai said Fischer became involved in a dispute with
guards when he asked for an additional boiled egg at
breakfast. The dispute escalated to a scuffle, leading
Fischer to be placed in solitary confinement.
“Both psychologically and mentally, he is reaching his
limits,” she said.
An official at the detention center declined to comment,
citing privacy and security reasons.
Watai and other Fischer supporters, including a longtime
friend who came to Japan last week in hopes of taking
Fischer back to Iceland, said last week that they and
Fischer’s lawyers had been prevented from meeting with
him since Wednesday.
Iceland, the site of the match where Fischer won the
world chess title in 1972 in a classic Cold War
encounter with Soviet champion Boris Spassky, offered
Fischer a home late last year.
In February, it agreed to issue him a special passport
that would allow him to travel through 15 West European
countries in what is known as the Schengen Zone, thereby
avoiding deportation.
“Our instruction is only to release it to him when the
Japanese authorities release him from detention,” he
added.
It remained unclear, however, whether Japanese
immigration authorities would agree to let Fischer go to
Iceland rather than deport him to the United States.
On Friday, Fischer formally applied to Japanese
immigration authorities for voluntary departure to
Iceland.
“I believe that all the conditions for him to leave for
Iceland have now been satisfied,” Masako Suzuki, one of
Fischer’s lawyers, said Monday.
Fischer’s longtime Icelandic friend Saemundur Palsson,
who met the chess great when he was his bodyguard during
the 1972 match, said he was unhappy with Japan’s
handling of the case.
“I am very disappointed in the Japanese people for
taking part in this because I thought they were one of
the best and most polite people I had ever met,” he
said.
In the latest twist in the case, a Japanese newspaper
reported Sunday that Fischer might be indicted by U.S.
authorities for tax evasion, after which the U.S.
government might ask for him to be handed over by Japan.
Fischer’s lawyers declined to comment on the report,
saying they still had to verify details.
|
|
|
