London, Europe Brief News – The gold medallist Mo Farah has spoken publicly for the first time about being brought to the UK and forced to work as a child servant.
The 39-year-old said he had been given the name Hussein Abdi Kahin when he was born in Somaliland. He said he was trafficked to the UK by an unknown woman as a child, forced to assume the identity of an unknown boy to him named Mohamed Farah, and work as a servant.
“The truth is I’m not who you think I am,” Farah said in the BBC TV documentary. “Most people know me as Mo Farah, but it’s not my name or it’s not the reality.”
The revelations shed new light on the life of one of the world’s modern sports legends, with advocates saying it also underscores the harsh realities many vulnerable refugees and migrants face.
Farah had previously said he had come to the UK as a refugee from Somalia with his parents.
In the documentary – The Real Mo Farah – the star athlete instead revealed that his father had been killed in Somalia’s civil war and that he had been separated from his mother before coming to the UK.
He had travelled to Djibouti at the age of eight or nine with the unknown woman.
He said he thought he was going to go to Europe to live with relatives, but when he arrived in the UK, the woman who accompanied him took a piece of paper from him that had his relatives’ contact details and “ripped it up and put it in the bin”.
I want to feel normal
“At that moment, I knew I was in trouble,” he said.
Farah, who was knighted in 2013, said he was inspired to go public with his story by his children.
“I’ve been keeping it for so long, it’s been difficult because you don’t want to face it and often my kids ask questions, ‘Dad, how come this?’ And you’ve always got an answer for everything, but you haven’t got an answer for that,” he said.
“That’s the main reason in telling my story because I want to feel normal and don’t feel like you’re holding on to something.”
