Olympian says he was trafficked to UK as child
Four-time Olympic champion Mo Farah says he was illegally brought to the U.K. as a young boy and forced to care for other children before he escaped a life of servitude through running.
In a new documentary, Farah says his real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin and that he was taken from the East African nation of Djibouti. The film that tells the story of his being trafficked, “The Real Mo Farah,” was produced by the BBC and Red Bull Studios, and the BBC is scheduled to broadcast it Wednesday.
The athlete says he was 8 or 9 years old when a woman he didn’t know brought him to Britain using fake travel documents that included his picture alongside the name Mohammed Farah,
the BBC reported.
The woman took him to an apartment in west London where he was forced to care for her children, Farah said. He wasn’t allowed to go to school until he was 12.
“I wasn’t treated as part of the family.,” Farah says in the documentary. “If I wanted food in my mouth, my job was to look after those kids — shower them, cook for them, clean for them.”
Farah, who represented Britain at three Olympic Games, won gold medals in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs at both the 2012 London Olympics and the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.
He previously said he had moved to Britain with his parents as a refugee from Somalia.
But in the documentary, he says his parents never were in the U.K.
His father was killed by stray gunfire during unrest in Somalia when Farah was 4 years old, according to the film. His mother and two brothers live on the family farm in Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia that is not internationally recognized.
ETC.
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