Sir Mo Farah, one of the UK’s greatest athletes, has revealed that he was “trafficked” as a child and forced into domestic servitude for a London family.
The four-time Olympic champion had previously claimed he had left Somalia aged 8 to join his father, after his parents made the decision to send three of their six children to London.
However, in a new BBC One documentary, The Real Mo Farah, airing on Wednesday (June 13), the 39-year-old said that he was instead smuggled into London by a stranger under a false name after escaping war in Somalia.
Farah also announced that “Mo Farah” was not his real name: “Most people know me as Mo Farah, but that’s not my name or it’s not the reality. The real story is I was born in Somaliland, north of Somalia, as Hussein Abdi Kahin.”
In the documentary, the Olympic star also admits that the name Mohamed Farah was stolen from another child and used to create a fake passport. “When I was 4, my dad was killed in the civil war,” he says. “As a family we were torn apart. I was separated from my mother, and I was brought into the UK illegally under the name of another child called Mohamed Farah.”
Farah said he and his twin, Hassan, were sent by their mother to live with an uncle in neighbouring Djibouti for their own safety. Farah said he recalled a woman he had never met visiting the house several times to observe him. He was told that she would be taking him to Europe to live with relatives.
However, when he eventually arrived in the UK, he faced a very different reality: “I had all the contact details for my relative and once we got to her house, the lady took it off me and right in front of me ripped them up and put it in the bin, and at that moment I knew I was in trouble.”
Farah goes into detail about the gruelling domestic housework he had to do while being told: “if you ever want to see your family again, don’t say anything.” His only escape, he said, was athletics. Having been kept from school for two years, he was eventually allowed to attend Feltham Community College in South West London, where he confided in his PE teacher, Alan Watkinson, revealing his true identity and the family he was being forced to work for.
Watkinson contacted social services and helped Farah find another Somali family to live with. The new and stable environment allowed him to thrive as an athlete throughout his high-school years, and he was awarded British citizenship in 2000.
“I still missed my real family, but from that moment everything got better,” Farah said. “I felt like a lot of stuff was lifted off my shoulders, and I felt like me. That’s when Mo came out—the real Mo.”
