Toronto man describes his ‘hour of fear’
Canadian was in Kenya when he and his colleague were suddenly detained, deported
A dinner outing turned into a scene from an action movie on Friday night when Toronto man Andreas Katsouris was swarmed in a Nairobi street by men who detained him, took his cellphones and demanded he take them to a colleague.
“I was on my way to dinner on Friday night when five or six toughlooking guys wearing street clothes surrounded me, and then pretty soon there were a dozen of them,” Katsouris said.
“I saw one of their cellphones and there was a photo of me on it. They said they had been looking for me.”
The men, who identified them- selves as police, asked Katsouris to bring them to his American co-worker, John Aristotle Phillips.
He was given only a few minutes to call his wife before his two phones and laptop were taken from him, he told the Star over the phone from Delft, Netherlands, where he has since been reunited with his wife and daughter.
When the officers arrived at Katsouris’s apartment, they asked him and Phillips to pack their bags. He said when they both protested, the officers became aggressive and began pushing and shoving them. Phillips was then handcuffed. “One guy also grabbed the glasses off my face. I’m pretty much blind without my glasses, and then I was like, ‘OK, we don’t have to do things this way,’ and then he put them back on.”
The officers also denied Katsouris and Phillips the chance to contact lawyers or access to consular assistance, he said. Representatives for the Kenyan government did not immediately respond to The Canadian Press’s requests for comment.
Katsouris, who had been working on the opposition campaign for Kenya’s presidential election when he was apprehended, packed his belongings and got into the officers’ vehicle. He said Phillips later told him he was put into the back of another car with a man holding a “large machine gun.” Phillips’ handcuffs were later removed.
The officers would not answer Katsouris’s questions about where they were going or why they were being held.
“I’m sitting in the car with four or five guys, and two of them are sitting on either side of me and it is pitchblack outside. In terms of kidnapping and if I was going to be killed, it definitely crossed my mind,” he said.
After about a half an hour of driving, Katsouris said the tension eased. Five hours later, he was at the airport, where he and Phillips were brought into a room and told they were being deported because of a violation of their visas.
Katsouris said officers produced no documentation to justify his detention. 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, but he believes the deportation was political. Katsouris is senior vice-president of global services at Aristotle, Inc., a political consulting firm that provides various services to campaigns, including strategy and data analysis. Phillips is the company’s CEO.
Katsouris said he saw multiple reports from Kenyan media that a polling station from his opposition campaign was vandalized while he was detained.