Japan

Bobby Fischer freed, heads for Iceland

Chess legend Bobby Fischer was freed today after nearly nine months in a Japanese detention center and immediately headed for the airport to board a flight to his new home, Iceland.

Fischer, sporting a beard and a baseball cap pulled down low over his face, left the immigration detention center on Tokyo’s outskirts early today.

He was accompanied by his fiancee, Miyoko Watai, the head of Japan’s chess association, and officials from the Icelandic Embassy. He was scheduled to catch an afternoon flight to Denmark en route to Iceland.

Fischer is wanted by the United States for violating sanctions imposed on the former Yugoslavia by playing an exhibition match against Russian Boris Spassky in 1992.

Greece

Canadian teen faces trial for taking rock

Greek authorities arrested and charged a 16-year-old Canadian girl who allegedly took a piece of marble from the grounds of the 2,500-year-old Parthenon while posing for a photograph.

Madelaine Gierc, of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, was arrested Sunday after a security guard saw her picking up a stone near the ancient monument on Acropolis Hill. Gierc was charged with illegally possessing antiquities.

Investigating magistrate Melpomeni Chiotou ordered Gierc released from custody Tuesday and said she could leave the country, pending trial, court officials said. No trial date was set.

The charges carry a maximum of 10 years in prison, though such severe sentences are rarely imposed.

Ecuador

Police fire tear gas to disperse legislators

Police fired tear gas into Ecuador’s Congress before dawn Wednesday to disperse opposition lawmakers who refused to leave after a legislative session in Quito that cut short a debate on candidates for attorney general.

Congressman Omar Quintana, president of the legislature, ordered the electricity cut off to disrupt a sit-in by about 40 lawmakers, then authorized police to move in about 2 a.m. to force the 15 remaining legislators to abandon the building.

Ecuadorean TV broadcast images of two policemen firing tear gas into the darkened chamber and lawmakers rushing out through a side door. There were no injuries or arrests.

Quintana abruptly ended the legislative session late Tuesday just as the opposition appeared on the verge of mustering enough votes to block a government-backed candidate from consideration for attorney general.

Austria

Nazi-clinic doctor too ill for trial

A doctor who worked at a clinic where the Nazis killed thousands of children deemed “unworthy” will not be put on trial because he suffers from severe dementia, Austria’s justice minister said.

Dr. Heinrich Gross, who faced charges in the deaths of nine children, is not mentally capable of following court proceedings, Justice Minister Karin Miklautsch said in a document released Tuesday in Vienna.

The charges against Gross, 89, will remain pending, said Viktor Eggert, head of the Justice Ministry’s political and war crimes department.

“The process is only suspended. It will end at some point with the suspect’s death,” he said.

Gross was a leading doctor in Vienna’s notorious Am Spiegelgrund clinic. Historians and survivors of the clinic have accused him of participating in clinic experiments on thousands of children deemed by the Nazis to be physically, mentally or otherwise unfit. The Nazis called such children “unworthy lives.”

Serbia-Montenegro

Bosnian Serb general surrenders to U.N. court

A senior Bosnian Serb general indicted in the 1995 massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica surrendered Wednesday to the U.N. war crimes tribunal, a court spokesman said.

Vinko Pandurevic was driven to the U.N. detention center outside The Hague, Netherlands, after a flight from Belgrade arranged by the Serbian government. Serbian authorities had announced on Sunday that they had persuaded him to surrender.

Pandurevic has been indicted for genocide, violations of the laws or customs of war and crimes against humanity. The indictment against him was secretly issued in 1998 and unsealed in 2001.

During Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, Pandurevic commanded the Bosnian Serb army’s so-called Zvornik Brigade. The brigade answered to commander Gen. Ratko Mladic and took part in the storming of Srebrenica, a U.N.-protected Muslim enclave, in July 1995. The onslaught was followed by summary executions of Muslim males in what became Europe’s worst carnage since World War II.

Kyrgyzstan

Government threatens force to restore order

Authorities raised the stakes Wednesday in a standoff with opposition groups that have seized control of large parts of southern Kyrgyzstan, with riot police breaking up a protest in the capital and top officials warning they may use force to restore order elsewhere.

Hints of a potential crackdown came from two tough-talking new law enforcement officials appointed by President Askar Akayev after he fired their predecessors over the unrest in the Central Asian nation of mainly Turkic-speaking people.

Protesters angered over allegedly fraudulent parliamentary elections have seized government administration buildings in three of Kyrgyzstan’s seven regions and in smaller districts within two other regions.

Most are in the south, where opposition to Akayev historically has been strongest, but one is in Talas, in the north, where his base of support generally had been more firm.