Four-time Olympic champion Mo Farah(Mohamed Farah) has revealed that he was illegally brought to the UK from Djibouti by naming another child. “The truth is I’m not what you think I am,” said the 39-year-old Farah in the BBC documentary ‘The Real Mo Farah’, Britain’s first track and field player to win four Olympic gold medals. Bane Farah said that her children inspired her to tell the truth about the past.
Farah told the BBC, “The real story is that I was born as Hussein Abdi Kahin in Somaliland, in the north of Somalia.” Did not live in UK. When I was four years old my father was killed in the civil war, it broke us as a family.”
Farah continued, “I was separated from my mother and brought to the UK, illegally, with another child named Mohamed Farah.” Farah said he thought he was going to Europe to be with her relatives. And he recalled how at the age of nine he went through a passport check in Britain.
Farah further said that he had reached there after traveling with a woman he didn’t already know. The athlete also went to the house in West London where he lived as a child. He said that his memories of that house are not good as he was not considered a part of the family.
Farah eventually told the truth to his teacher, Ellen Watkinson, and stayed with his friend’s mother who took care of him. Farah lived with him for seven years. Watkinson eventually applied for Farah’s UK citizenship in what he called a “long process”. Farah got British citizenship in 2000.