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.
Icelandic passport awaits at embassy
Icelandic Ambassador to Japan Thordur Oskarsson said that the passport has been issued and is being held at the embassy in Tokyo pending Fischer’s release.
“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.
