Canadian working with Kenya opposition party detained, to be deported
Posted Aug 6, 2017 06:53:52 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A campaign data company says a Canadian working on the opposition party’s campaign was detained in Kenya and is facing deportation.
A spokeswoman for Aristotle, Inc. – a political consulting company that provides various services to campaigns, including strategy and data analysis – says the Canadian senior vice-president of global services, Andreas Katsouris, and CEO John Aristotle Phillips were detained Friday night. They’re expected to be deported Saturday night.
Spokeswoman Brandi Travis says Katsouris is a Canadian working out of Toronto.
Travis says the two men were in the African country assisting opposition candidate Raila Odinga, and had become involved in the Kenyan election because they thought it had the potential for irregularities.
Saturday was the last day of campaigning in the election, which is set for Tuesday.
Global Affairs Canada says it is providing assistance to a Canadian detained in Nairobi but would not give any further details. The U.S. Embassy in Kenya said on Twitter that they were “safe and departing” the country.
The detentions occurred at around the same time that armed and masked police raided an opposition vote counting centre, intimidating workers and seizing equipment, said James Orengo, a senior member of the opposition National Super Alliance.
Kenyan police on Saturday denied allegations that officers broke into political party offices on Friday, saying no report of a burglary has been made to any police station.
Recent elections in the East African high-tech and commercial hub have been hotly contested, and more than 1,000 people were killed in post-election violence a decade ago.
Kenyatta prevailed over Odinga in a 2013 vote that was mostly peaceful but tainted by opposition allegations of vote-rigging. Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is among the thousands of expected election observers this time around.
Some in the nation of 44 million people have been leaving the capital because of the threat of chaos, while many are simply going home to vote.
The torture and killing in recent days of a key election official in charge of the electronic voting system has some concerned about the possibility of vote tampering.
