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REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) -- Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess master who became a Cold War icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky as world champion in 1972, has died aged 64.
Spokesman Gardar Sverrisson said Fischer passed away in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday. There was no immediate word on cause of death.
United States-born Fischer, a fierce critic of his homeland who renounced his U.S. citizenship, moved to Iceland in 2005.
Fischer told reporters that year that he was finished with a chess world he regarded as corrupt, and he sparred with U.S. journalists who asked about his anti-American tirades.
"The United States is evil. There's this axis of evil. What about the allies of evil -- the United States, England, Japan, Australia? These are the evildoers," Fischer said.
He was born in Chicago but grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and became U.S. chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15.
Fischer was wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Cold War rival Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions.
He beat Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Reykjavik to claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.
