A Toronto man working on the opposition’s presidential election campaign in Kenya has been deported after being detained ahead of Tuesday’s contentious vote, his wife says.

“As far as we know he boarded the plane (in Nairobi),” Jennifer Mary Bell said of her husband, Andreas Katsouris.

“I’ve spoken to him twice today, both very, very briefly, like maybe 60 seconds at the most,” Bell said Saturday in an interview from the Netherlands, where he is expected to join her after the flight to Germany.

“I spoke to him early this morning and he was on a monitored call, he couldn’t really talk. He sounded fine, he sounded very calm. He said they were treating them fine. And then I spoke to him just as he was getting on the plane a couple hours ago. He sounds upset.

“He’s been there since late June, they’ve been working their hearts out on this campaign and of course it’s really disappointing to have it end this way.”

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.

He and the company’s CEO, John Aristotle Phillips, an American, were detained Friday night in the capital, Nairobi, said Aristotle spokesperson Brandi Travis.

Travis said the two men were in Kenya assisting opposition candidate Raila Odinga, and had become involved in the election because they thought it had the potential for irregularities.

“I was originally just informed that they were missing and that they had been taken somewhere,” said Bell, who works in public health as an epidemiologist.

“That was last night. I got an urgent call to say that they had been apprehended and taken to some building, but nobody knew where.”

Bell said the men went out for dinner with a member of the campaign staff, but were apprehended. The campaign staff member was the one who sounded the alarm.

Bell said her husband was safe and had been well-treated, despite reports that Phillips had been assaulted and put in the trunk of a vehicle.

James Orengo, a senior member of the opposition National Super Alliance, told reporters that Phillips was “very adamant about his rights under the constitution, civic rights, was molested, thrown into the boot, and taken away with his colleague.”

Though Bell said she had a feeling Katsouris would be OK — going into potentially dangerous countries during elections is “kind of his thing” — she called her MP to make sure the incident was on the Canadian government’s radar.

But the incident does raise questions.

“To me the interesting question is why this happened, and why the (Kenyan) government would choose to do something so visible with an American and a Canadian,” she said. “It suggests a motive that isn’t necessarily pure.”

President Uhuru Kenyatta — the son of Kenya’s first president — will face longtime opposition leader Odinga, the son of the country’s first vice-president.

Odinga has run unsuccessfully for the top post in three previous contests.

Recent elections in Kenya, East Africa’s high-tech and commercial hub, have been hotly contested; 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.

Travis said Katsouris and Phillips knew there were risks associated with working for the opposition in Kenya, but they thought Odinga’s cause was worth it.

“They do go into countries that aren’t always safe,” she said, “but they think it’s the right thing to do.”

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James Orengo, a senior member of the opposition National Super Alliance, told The Associated Press that the detention of Katsouris and Phillips happened around the same time that armed and masked police raided an opposition vote-counting centre, intimidating workers and seizing equipment. He also said two Ghanaians working on the opposition campaign have been deported.

Kenyan police denied allegations that officers broke into political party offices on Friday, saying no report of a burglary has been made to any police station.