From the 'Los Angeles Times':

http://ktla.trb.com/news/nationworld...her_lat,0,1774
445.story?coll=ktla-news-1

or clicl: http://tinyurl.com/5lgcq

***BEGIN ARTICLE***

Fischer's Gambit: 'I'm a German'

Chess legend invokes lineage in an attempt to stymie any U.S.
extradition.

By Bruce Wallace
Times Staff Writer

July 29, 2004, 2:13 PM PDT

TOKYO -- With ferocious defiance from a jail cell in Japan, chess legend
Bobby Fischer has told authorities he is a German citizen with the
documents to prove it, invoking his lineage to a German-born father in
an attempt to stymie any U.S. extradition proceedings against him.

Fischer is in custody at Tokyo's Narita International Airport, where
Japanese immigration officials seized him — in a rough struggle, they
acknowledge — on July 13 as he tried to leave Japan for the Philippines.

The Japanese government ruled Tuesday that it would deport Fischer for
entering the country in April without a legal passport.

Washington canceled Fischer's U.S. passport in December 2003 on the
grounds that the onetime world chess champion is a fugitive, wanted for
defying a presidential order by the first President Bush to not play a
in $5-million chess exhibition in the disintegrating Yugoslav federation
in 1992.

Fischer is expected to appeal a deportation order from the Japanese
government before a midnight Friday deadline.

But speaking today through a loosely organized committee of 20 chess-
playing supporters in Tokyo, he went on the offensive, claiming he is a
German citizen. He said his father, Hans Gerhardt Fischer, was born in
1908 in Berlin.

Under German law, anyone born before 1975 to a German father who was
married at the time, is entitled to citizenship. And Germany's
extradition treaties do not allow its citizens to be deported to face
charges in other countries, German officials in Tokyo said.

In the 1960s and '70s, Fischer transformed chess from nerdy to sexy and
became a Cold War-era hero by vanquishing Boris Spassky, the Soviet
Union's best, in the legendary 1972 world championship contest.

Fischer has been nearly a recluse ever since. Now 61, he has emerged in
public only fitfully in recent years, usually to berate the U.S.
government for what he regards as its evil foreign policies and to cast
himself as the victim of persecution by "world Jewry."

***END ARTICLE***

--
banana "The thing I hate about you, Rowntree, is the way you
give Coca-Cola to your scum, and your best teddy-bear to
Oxfam, and expect us to lick your frigid fingers for the
rest of your frigid life." (Mick Travis, 'If...', 1968)