Fischer to wed chess official
The Associated Press
TOKYO — Former chess champion Bobby Fischer announced plans Monday to marry a Japanese chess official and appealed to Secretary of State Colin Powell to help him renounce his U.S. citizenship.
Bobby Fischer pauses before a game in the World Chess Championship in 1992. He plans to marry a Japanese chess official and wants to renounce his citizenship.
AP File Photo
Fischer faces deportation to the United States, where he is wanted for violating international sanctions by playing a match in the former Yugoslavia in 1992. He was detained in Japan last month when he tried to travel on a revoked American passport.
Fischer's lawyer, Masako Suzuki, said the former world champion and Japan Chess Association President Miyoko Watai had signed marriage papers. The two had been living together since 2000 and decided to formalize their relationship, Suzuki said in a statement. It was not immediately clear how marriage to a Japanese citizen would affect the efforts to extradite Fischer. Calls to Watai's office were not returned Monday.
Fischer, meanwhile, was pursuing his effort to forsake U.S. citizenship, although that could leave him stateless, Suzuki said.
The lawyer faxed a letter to Powell and the U.S. Embassy in Japan on Monday demanding that an American consular officer be sent to see Fischer in detention to accept his renunciation of U.S. citizenship. While U.S. Embassy officials routinely meet requests for consular visits from hospitalized or detained citizens, there is no time limit for making such visits, embassy spokesman Michael Boyle said.
Fischer already has applied for asylum in Japan, had plans to apply for refugee status with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and was looking for other countries that might accept him as a refugee, Suzuki has said.
Fischer became a Cold War hero for his defeat of Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union in a series of matches in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972. Increasingly erratic and reclusive, he withdrew from competition, lost his world champion title and vanished from the public eye.
He reappeared to defeat Spassky again, in a highly publicized match in Yugoslavia in 1992. The U.S. government said the match violated U.N. sanctions against Yugoslavia, imposed for Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic's role in fomenting war in the Balkans.
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