The quick happening of events on Friday evening for Toronto man who was deported alongside several other foreigners working at NASA Tallying centre remains a puzzle.
On the fateful day, Andreas Katsouris was walking in the streets of Nairobi heading for dinner when six tough looking men approached and detained him immediately.
Katsouris in a phone interview with a Canadian Newspaper-The Star, from Delft in Netherlands said the six men were soon joined by others who identified themselves as police officers.
“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, he recalled.
“I saw one of their cell phones and there was a photo of me on it. They said they had been looking for me,” went on the Katsouris.
At this point, they demanded he takes them to his other colleague, John Aristotle Philips from USA before they gave him a few minutes to call his wife and later confiscated his two phones and laptop.
He later led them to their apartment with Philip where they were ordered to pack their bags.
Katsouris is a Senior Vice-President at Aristotle Inc, a political consulting firm which provides services to campaigns including data analysis and strategy. Philip is the company’s CEO.
They protested this and the officers became aggressive, pushing and shoving them around and Philip was handcuffed.
“One guy also grabbed my glasses off my face. I’m pretty much blind without my glasses, and them I was like ‘OK we don’t have to do things this way, and then he put them back on.”
Katsouris said the officers refused to allow them contact their lawyers or consular services.
He was bundled into one of the cars while Philip was bundled into another. He said Philip told him that there was an officer holding a huge “machine gun”.
The officers were mute; they would not answer to any question by Katsouris about where they were taking him.
“I’m sitting in a car with four or five guys, and two of them are sitting on either side of me and it is pitch black outside. In terms of kidnapping and if I was going to be killed, it definitely crossed my mind,” he said.
But after about five hours of panic, he was at the airport together with Philips locked in a room where they were informed of their deportation for violation of their visas.
They both had tourists visas which by law, did not allow them to be working in Kenya. However, he said he read a political angle in their deportation.
James Orengo, a National Super Aliance (NASA) principal told Associated Press that their deportation happened simultaneously with the raid of opposition’s tallying center in Nairobi.
Katsouris was put on the first flight connecting to Toronto which stopped at Frankfurt Airport. He boarded a train to Delft from Frankfurt.
The two have been in Nairobi since June and Katsouris said he was schoked to read about NASA’s Sifa Towers tallying centre raid where almost Everything was carted away.
He said he saw police officers go through his messages in his two phones, one Canadian and the other he got in Kenya and also on his company laptop where he has emails between him and the company’s employees.
He later got his phones back but the Kenyan one had no SIM card on it. His laptop which contained information about the opposition campaign was also left with the police.
Katsouris is now reunited with his wife Mary bell and 14-year old daughter. He surprised her hadn’t told her in detail what happened.
However, when she got a call from him, she probed the possibility of deportation which is likely given the political events in the country.
She contacted her MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and global affairs officials who handled Katsouris’ deportation process.
They will be heading to their Toronto home on Saturday from Netherlands.
