Former chess champion Bobby Fischer's body has been exhumed to provide forensic evidence in a paternity suit.

Iceland's Supreme Court said tissue samples were needed to determine the paternity of Jinky Young, the Filipina daughter of Fischer's former lover. Young provided a DNA sample last year during a trip to Iceland.

Fischer, who spent his last years as a fugitive from US authorities after defying international sanctions against the former Yugoslavia, spent time in the Philippines and Japan before moving to Iceland, where he was offered citizenship in the mid-2000s.

The former child prodigy became the United States' only world chess champion by defeating Soviet masters, but refused to defend his title and relinquished it to the Soviet champion Anatoly Karpov in 1975.

His estate, estimated at around $2 million, has been the subject of a long-running inheritance dispute involving claims by a former wife, two nephews and the US tax authorities.

Fischer died in Reykjavik at the age of 64 after an unspecified illness and was buried near the town of Selfoss in 2008.