TOKYO — After a series of strategic moves worthy of one of his greatest matches, fugitive chess legend Bobby Fischer reached an agreement with Japanese authorities to avoid deportation to the United States yesterday.

He walked out of a Japanese detention center today, more than eight months after being wrestled into custody for attempting to leave the country on an allegedly revoked U.S. passport.

Wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, Fischer, 62, and Miyoko Watai, his Japanese fiancée, boarded a commercial airliner bound for Copenhagen, Denmark, with a connecting flight to Reykjavik, Iceland.

The journey marks Fischer's first return to the remote island nation that hosted his historic 1972 victory over Russian rival Boris Spassky, and which embraced him again this week by granting him citizenship and allowing him to leave Japan legally.

His release ended for now a murky legal and personal saga that festered into a diplomatic irritant between the United States, Japan, and, more recently, Iceland.

"I was kidnapped," the heavily bearded, former world chess champion told reporters clustered at the departure gates of Tokyo's Narita International Airport. "Bush is a criminal. He's a gangster."

Fischer, a New York-native, has dodged a U.S. arrest warrant since making an anti-American "political statement" by playing a 1992 chess match in Yugoslavia in alleged violation of then-standing U.S. sanctions.

Fischer evaded U.S. authorities for more than a decade with the help of global chess fans from Argentina to the Philippines. He was finally nabbed at Narita airport last July for traveling on a voided U.S. passport.

But Fischer's alleged 1992 crime is not considered an extraditable offense in Japan, and U.S. authorities were instead counting on Japanese laws mandating deportation of persons detained for traveling on false documents to their countries of citizenship. Fischer tried a number of failed countermoves to block an unwelcome homecoming to the United States — including seeking refugee status, renouncing his U.S. citizenship and unveiling plans to marry his avowed companion Watai, a four-time Japan women's chess champion.

But he found his checkmate in Iceland, where, at Fischer's request, the parliament honored his intellect and "historic connection" with the tiny island nation stemming from his 1972 match there by awarding him Icelandic citizenship with a 40-0 vote on Monday. An eccentric personality known for his bizarre behavior at matches and brief adherence to a religious cult, he became a celebrated American hero after besting Spassky at the 1972 championship in Reykjavik.

But in the years following his early retirement from the game, Fischer grew to resent the United States, regaling it as part of the "global Jewish conspiracy" despite the fact that his mother was Jewish.

Fischer has insisted from his Japanese jail cell that U.S. officials are persecuting him for his political beliefs. His supporters here have noted that U.S. authorities only revoked his passport after he took to the airwaves in Manila on Sept. 11, 2001, hailing the terrorist attacks on the United States as "wonderful news."