REVEALED: Real story of how Mo Farah was smuggled into Britain
Mail investigation across three countries discovers how he was picked at random and flown in on a fake visa — thanks to one man’s very complicated love life . . .
directly about the dramatic change of plan because she didn’t have a mobile phone and communication with the outside world was problematic.
Did Nimco have ulterior motives all along?
Given the allegations levelled against her by Sir Mo, who says he was forced to look after Nimco’s two younger sons at their council flat in Hounslow, West London — ‘to shower them, to cook for them, clean for them’ — many will believe she did, although she has denied mistreating him.
‘She just wanted to give him a better life,’ another relative insisted. ‘This was quite common among Somalis back then. They were doing anything they could to get children out of the country. It was not human trafficking.’
What we do know is that Mo boarded a train from Djibouti to the Ethiopian capital Addis
Ababa with Nimco and her two sons.
From there they took a heavily delayed Sudan Airways flight to Heathrow in the middle of the night, where Mukhtar was waiting.
The family source who has spoken to Mukhtar takes up the story.
‘He almost fainted when he saw them. He was asking, “Who is this child? Where is my child?”
‘He told me he considered going to the Home Office the next morning and telling them what Nimco had done, but then he thought about this child [Mo] with no mother or father, and decided it would be better for him if he kept quiet.’
Mukhtar’s part in the controversy has inevitably been questioned, because he was married to Nimco.
But in the documentary, Sir Mo says: ‘When the man [Mukhtar] was around, I was treated very differently. But he was never there, or working or something, and often we wouldn’t see him for weeks.’ Not long after Nimco and the children moved here to join her husband, the couple divorced.
Sir Mo’s account — again for entirely understandable reasons — contrasts dramatically with the narrative in his autobiography, Twin Ambitions, published in the aftermath of his Olympic triumph, and his prime-time interviews with Jonathan Ross and Piers Morgan, which are filled with anecdotes about things that never happened and a father he never knew.
The trauma of his childhood and uncertain immigration status is never touched on.
In reality, he escaped from his predicament only after confiding in his PE teacher Alan Watkinson at Feltham Community College in South-West London.
Social services were alerted and he went to live with a schoolfriend’s mother, Kinsi, where, finally happy and cared for, he remained for seven years.
It was Mukhtar, say his family back in Somaliland, who helped Mo move after he split up with his wife. Kinsi, after all, is Mukhtar’s sister. There is no mention of his involvement, however, in the programme.
By then, Mo’s athletic talent was already beginning to be noticed — and from here, his story becomes the one we know.
As for Mukhtar, he remained in uploaded at the time are still on social media.
Father and son reconnected in 2019 when Mohamed, now 39 — the same age as Sir Mo — moved to Somaliland to live with him. He is now a mature student at Istanbul Aydin University.
At the end of the BBC documentary, Sir Mo, who has found contentment away from the track as a family man with wife Tania and their four children, gets to meet Mohamed over a video call.
They discover they have something in common: they are both Arsenal fans.
How would their lives have turned out if Mohamed, not Sir Mo, had been on the plane? But for a quirk of fate — and Mukhtar’s spurned ex-wife — he would have been.
It was a ‘sliding doors’ moment that not only altered the course of their lives, but the course of sporting history too.
‘She just wanted to give him a better life’