Olympic hero Mo Farah has revealed to the BBC that he was trafficked into to the UK as a child and that Mo Farah is not his actual name but was forced onto him. He admitted that he arrived to the country illegally through an unknown women who told him that she would take him to relatives in Europe.
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In the past, Farah claimed that he had come to the UK with his parents from Somalia, however he has now revealed that his birth parents have never actually lived in the UK, with his family still living in Somalia except his father who was sadly killed when Mo was only 4 whilst fighting in the Somali civil war.
The long-distance runner revealed that he was born with the name Hussein Abdi Kahin and that he was born in the internationally unrecognized country Somaliland, north of Somalia. Farah stated that “As a family we were torn apart,” and “I was separated from my mother, and I was brought into the UK illegally under the name of another child called Mohamed Farah.”
He traveled to the UK with a women he never met before, thinking he was going to stay with relatives. He admitted that he was hopeful and excited and that he had never been on a plane before. This hope and excitement quickly went away when this women took him to her apartment in London and teared up the paper with his relative’s contacts in front of him.
He spent the next few years being forced to take care of the women’s children and doing housework until he was 12 when he was entered into Feltham Community College. He found refuge in sport and PE and later on even told his heartbreaking story to his than PE teacher Alan Watkinson. With the help of Watkinson, he found a Somali foster family to take care of him, became a British citizen and at the same time a British Olympic hero winning Gold in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics.
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