The Canadian working for the National Super Alliance (NASA) who was arrested and deported from Kenya over the weekend has revealed that he was heading for dinner when he was ambushed by men believed to be police officers.
Andreas Katsouris is the senior vice-president of global services at Aristotle, Inc., a political consulting firm that provides various services to campaigns, including strategy and data analysis.
According to sources, Mr Katsouris was swarmed in a Nairobi street by men who detained him, took his cell phones and demanded he takes them to a colleague, John Aristotle Phillips, the company’s CEO.
They were in Kenya to assist opposition candidate Raila Odinga and had become involved in the election because they thought it had the potential for irregularities.
“I was on my way to dinner on Friday night when five or six tough looking guys wearing street clothes surrounded me, and then pretty soon there was a dozen of them.
“I saw one of their cell phones and there was a photo of me on it. They said they had been looking for me," he was quoted by The Star.
[caption caption="Andreas Katsouris"]
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The two men were detained in the capital according to Aristotle's spokesperson Brandi Travis and five hours later they were at the airport where they were told that they were being deported because of a violation of their visas.
Katsouris said officers produced no documentation to justify his detention and he was put on a connecting flight to Toronto, which first stopped at Frankfurt Airport, where he then took a train to Delft.
“It was 23 hours of boredom and about an hour of fear,” he said.
Katsouris said he and Phillips both had tourist visas, which are not sufficient for their employment in Kenya, but he believes the deportation was political.
Siaya Senator James Orengo described the two men as "friends from Canada and the United States".
"Both of them were sharing their experiences with us," he said without providing further details.
He added that two Ghanaian electoral consultants "coming to help us and share their experiences with us" had also been denied entry to Kenya, but did not give their names.
