Kasparov hit over the head with chessboard

.c The Associated Press

MOSCOW (AP) – Garry Kasparov, the world’s former No. 1 chess player
who quit the professional game last month to focus on politics, said
Saturday that he had been hit over the head with a chessboard in what
appears to have been a politically motivated attack.

Kasparov was not injured Friday when he was hit with the chessboard
after signing it for a young man at an event in Moscow.

A spokeswoman for Kasparov, Marina Litvinovich, said the assailant
told the chess champion: “I admired you as a chess player, but you
gave that up for politics.”

She said the unidentified attacker – who did not reveal his political
allegiance – had tried to hit Kasparov a second time but was hauled
away by security guards.

“It was a fairly nasty incident, it was not very pleasant
psychologically,” Kasparov told the private NTV
television. “Yesterday, I was just about able to muster up enough
humor to joke darkly that, luckily in the Soviet Union, chess and not
baseball was popular.”

The 41-year-old Kasparov, a brilliant and aggressive tactician
regarded by many as the greatest chess player of all time, has been
ranked No. 1 in the world since 1984.

But the outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin retired last
month, saying at the time that he planned to focus on politics and do
“everything in my power to resist Putin’s dictatorship.”

He plays a leading role in the Committee 2008: Free Choice, a group
formed by liberal opposition leaders.

Putin, a former KGB colonel who came to power in 2000, has been
accused of stifling democratic freedoms by placing national television
under effective state control and centralizing power by boosting
Kremlin control of parliament and country’s regions.

04/16/05 11:08 EDT