The four-time Olympic champion, Mo Farah explains the “truth” of his arrival to the UK in a BBC documentary titled “The Real Mo Farah,” which airs on Wednesday.
Hussein Abdi Kahin, 39, arrived in the guise of Mohamed Farah after being flown over by a lady he had never met. Sir Mo adds that his parents had never visited the United Kingdom.
Hussein Abdi Kahin AKA Sir Mo FarahTrafficked To UK As A Child
Long-distance racer, Sir Mo Farah revealed his original name to be Hussein Abdi Kahin. In his documentary, he mentioned that as a child he was taken to the UK illegally and forced to work as a domestic servant.
“Most people know me as Mo Farah, but it’s not my name, or it’s not the truth,” he stated in the documentary.
The Olympic champion told the BBC that people who flew him over from Djibouti gave him the name Mohamed Farah.
He claims that when he was nine years old, he was carried over from an east African nation by a woman he had never seen and forced to watch after the children of another family.
“I simply kept blocking it out for years,” the Team GB athlete admits.
“However, you can only do so for so long.”
The long-distance runner earlier stated that he arrived in the UK as a refugee with his parents from Somalia. But the truth was otherwise.
In a BBC and Red Bull Studios video, viewed by BBC News, he finally claims that his parents have never visited the UK. His mother and two brothers reside on their family farm in Somaliland, a breakaway state.
According to him, the woman who brought him to the UK informed him that he will be sent to Europe to live with relatives. He recalled his reaction as “exciting.” “I’d never flown before,” he explains.
The woman instructed him to introduce himself as Mohamed. He claims she was carrying bogus travel paperwork with his photo next to the name “Mohamed Farah.”
Sir Mo claims that he had to undertake housekeeping and childcare if he wanted to eat and live. “If you ever want to see your family again, don’t say anything,” the lady allegedly threatened him.
“I’d often lock myself in the bathroom and cry,” he recalls.
His family did not allow him to attend school for the first few years, but when he was approximately 12 years old, he enrolled in Year 7 at Feltham Community College.
Sir Mo was identified as a Somalian refugee by staff.
Sarah Rennie, his former form instructor, tells the BBC that he arrived at school “unkempt and uncared for,” knew very little English, and was an “emotionally and culturally detached” youngster.
She claims that the folks who claimed to be his parents did not attend any parents’ night.
Alan Watkinson, Sir Mo’s PE instructor, saw a change in the little kid when he took to the athletics track. He also mentioned that the running saved him.
“The only way I could get out of this [living condition] was to get out and escape,” he explained.
The BBC asked the lady who brought Sir Mo to London for comment, but she did not answer.
Who Are Sir Mo Farah’s Biological Parents?
When Sir Mo was four years old, his biological father, Abdi, was killed by a stray gunshot during Somalia’s civil war. Somaliland proclaimed independence in 1991 but is not recognized internationally.
When they arrived in the UK, the lady brought him to her flat in Hounslow, west London, and removed a piece of paper from him that included the contact information for his relatives.
“She ripped it up and threw it away right in front of me,” he claims. As a result, he lost all of the documents as well as the information related to his biological parents and relatives in Somalia.
He only remembered his original name, i.e. Hussein Abdi Kahin. With the assistance of his PE teacher, Alan Watkinson, the Somalian runner was supplied with a new foster Somalian family and British citizenship.
“I still missed my actual family, but things improved after that,” Sir Mo added.
“I felt like a lot of weight had been lifted off my shoulders, and I felt like myself again. That’s when the real Mo appeared.”
Since then Sir Mo continued to establish himself as an athlete, and at the age of 14, he was asked to participate in English schools in a race in Latvia.
Since he didn’t have any travel paperwork, Mr. Watkinson assisted him in obtaining British citizenship under the name Mohamed Farah, which he received in July 2000.
Sir Mo is told in the program by barrister Allan Braddock that his nationality was technically “obtained through fraud or deceit.”
The government has the legal authority to revoke a person’s British citizenship if they gained it via deception. Mr. Briddock, on the other hand, assured that the likelihood of this happening in Sir Mo’s instance is low.
Briddock mentioned that he was forced to look after small children and work as a domestic worker. And he also notified the appropriate authorities, ‘that is not my name.’
“All of these factors work together to reduce the likelihood that the Home Office may deprive you of your nationality,” he added.
Hussein Abdi Kahin Is A Long-Distance Runner
Hussein Abdi Kahin is a long-distance runner, originally from Somalia but illegally brought and raised in the UK.
With 10 world titles, Farah is the most decorated athlete in British sports history. He became the first British athlete in history to win two gold medals at the same world championships.
His five gold medals at the European Athletics Championships made him the most successful athlete in the championships’ history in individual events.
He has won the European Athlete of the Year title three times and the British Athletics Writers Association British Athlete of the Year award six times, more than any other athlete.
Farah was named BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 2017.
Farah was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to athletics after being named Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2013.
He set a European record by winning the 2018 Chicago Marathon in 2:05:11.
Furthermore, after all those successful years, he finally gathers the courage to reveal his true story about his upbringing through BBC’s Documentary.
Sir Mo says he wants to tell his story to influence people’s perceptions of human trafficking and slavery.
“I had no idea that many other people were going through the same thing I was. It just goes to show how fortunate I was “he asserts