FISCHER FREE

On Thursday, March 24, 2005, Bobby Fischer will be released from the East Japan Immigration Detention Center in Ushiku, north of Tokyo, and he will drive to Narita Airport, to the east of Tokyo, for onward travel to his new home in Iceland. He will be joined by his fiancée, the women's chess champion of Japan, Ms. Miyoko Watai, who will fly to Iceland with him.
They should be leaving the detention center at 9:00 AM Japan time and arrive at Narita Airport sometime after 10:00 AM. At the airport, we will be trying to give Bobby Fischer a chance to speak to the media sometime between 10:00 AM and 12:00 noon. We hope he will be able to describe his Japanese ordeal and the two decades of harassment by the U.S. government for holding unapproved political views.
When he won the World Chess Championship in 1972 and took the title away from the Soviet Union, this true U.S. national hero showed the world how one freethinking man can defeat any system, no matter how powerful. By going forward, despite U.S. sanctions, with his rematch chess championship against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992, he demonstrated that no government can stop a man from freely practicing his art anywhere on this planet. And now, over the past nine months, Bobby Fischer has proven that the individual can withstand the combined forces of the world's mightiest governments, whenever he has justice on his side.
We have witnessed a historic battle.
Bobby Fischer will be flying out of Tokyo's Narita Airport on the Scandinavian Airways flight to Copenhagen that leaves at 12:40 PM on Thursday.