Harare — Sir Mo Farah has told the BBC that he was abducted from war-torn Somalia to the UK as a child, and forced to work as a servant. Farah spoke to BBC TV in the documentary The Real Mo Farah, which will be aired on July 13.
In the interview, the four-time Olympic champion says he’s been hiding the truth about his life for decades – revealing that even his name is not real.
“The truth is I’m not who you think I am. Most people know me as Mo Farah, but it’s not my name or it’s not the reality,” said Farah as he shared traumatic events of his childhood after being taken from his home.
When he was nine years old, Farah said in the BBC TV documentary, a woman he didn’t know before transported him from the East African nation and forced him to care for another family’s children.
The family forbid him from attending school for the first few years, but when he was about 12 years old, he registered at Feltham Community College.
Farah, who won the 5 000m-10 000m double at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and London in 2012, previously claimed that he and his parents fled Somalia for the UK.
“The real story is I was born in Somaliland, north of Somalia, as Hussein Abdi Kahin. Despite what I’ve said in the past, my parents never lived in the UK. When I was four, my dad was killed in the civil war, you know as a family we were torn apart,” he said in the documentary.
“I was separated from my mother, and I was brought into the UK illegally under the name of another child called Mohamed Farah.”
Farah became the first British track and field athlete to win four gold medals at the Olympics.
He has won the European Athlete of the Year award and the British Athletics Writers Association British Athlete of the Year award more than any other athlete, three times and six times respectively.
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In 2017, Farah won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. He then won the 2018 Chicago Marathon in a time of 2:05:11, a European record.
Farah, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to athletics, says that his children motivated him to share his story in public.
Now the athletic champion fears he could be stripped of his British citizenship which he technically obtained by fraud or misrepresentations.
The revelations highlight the harsh realities that many vulnerable refugees and migrants experience.
“There are thousands of people in this country like Sir Mo – people who have made new lives here and make incredible contributions: his bravery in telling his story gives hope to all who campaign for a fair and humane asylum system,” said Refugee Council, a UK based organisation which works with refugees and asylum seekers.
“We applaud Mo Farah for his bravery in telling his heartbreaking story – he underlines the human reality at the heart of so many stories like his – and the desperate need for safe and humane routes for people seeking asylum.”
The Somali Civil War is an armed conflict in Somalia that started in 1991, following the overthrow of the dictator, Siad Barre. The former British Empire of Somaliland, which had merged with Italian Somalia in 1960, declared unilateral independence in 1991, but has not gained international recognition.
Over the last 30 years, hundreds of thousands of people have fled Somalia because of political instability. To date over 800,000 Somali refugees remain in neighbouring countries and over 2.6 million Somalis are internally displaced in Somalia, according to the UN.
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