AN EPIC contest between Bobby Fischer, the former world chess champion, and the American and Japanese governments appears to have reached its endgame.

Mr Fischer, who has been detained in Japan since last July for having improper travel documents, was yesterday granted his dearest wish — an Icelandic passport and residency in the country where he won his greatest chess victory and where he is still seen as a hero.

Yet even as he fights encirclement in Japan, another attack is being readied by tax lawyers in the United States. This time it could be checkmate.

US Internal Revenue Service officials in Philadelphia want to indict Mr Fischer on five counts of tax evasion, according to a Japanese newspaper.

The story began in Reykjavik in 1972, when the American-born Mr Fischer defeated Boris Spassky, the Russian world champion. Twenty years later a rematch against Mr Spassky in Yugoslavia landed Mr Fischer in his present trouble. The game breached American sanctions against Yugoslavia imposed after the Balkans war.

In July last year his passport was seized when he tried to leave Japan, where he had spent several years living with his Japanese fiancée. He has been fighting deportation to the US ever since. Mr Fischer says that he is being persecuted for political reasons, which include his frequent and florid expressions of hatred for the US Government, Israel and all Jews. In his most notorious outburst, on the evening of September 22, 2001, he praised the September 11 terrorist attacks and expressed hopes that they would be followed by the execution of “several hundred thousand” Jews. He and his fiancée, Miyoko Watai, also a chess player, have applied to marry, and this week his lawyer received his Icelandic passport. However, the Japanese refuse to allow Mr Fischer to leave their custody, and the strain is showing. Last week he spent four days in solitary confinement after tearing the shirt of a guard who had declined to give him a boiled egg for breakfast. Speaking of the incident, Gardar Sverrisson, a member of a small Icelandic delegation visiting Tokyo on Mr Fisher’s behalf, said: “It was a blatant provocation. It is completely beyond our understanding why he is treated like a serious criminal.”

The US has been unable to extradite Mr Fischer so far because the crime of which he is accused — sanctions-busting — is not illegal in Japan. Tax evasion, on the other hand, is against the law in Japan and Iceland. Since both countries have extradition treaties with the US, they would be obliged to hand over Mr Fischer.

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