Who is Sir Mo Farah, Olympian who opened up about childhood trafficking?

New Delhi: Four times Olympics gold medallist Sir Mo Farah recently opened up about being trafficked from the East African country Djibouti. He is a British long-distance runner who has won six titles at the World Athletics Championships. One of the top athletes for Britain is not actually from Britain.

The story of trafficking

In a documentary by BBC, Mo Farah told that he was born on 23rd March 1983 in Somaliland. At the age of 4, he lost his father in a civil war and got separated from his mother. He revealed that he was trafficked to the United Kingdom (UK) through Djibouti at the age of 9. He told that a woman, whom he never met, took her to the UK to take care of another family’s children.

His name was also changed to Mohammed Farah, while his birth name was Hussein Abdi Kahin. The athlete kept all of this a secret. He has previously said he came to the UK from Somalia with his parents as a refugee, but now he opened up about the truth. He told that when that woman took him to west London, there she took and tore the piece of paper off him that had his relatives’ contact details on it. Farah says that was the moment when he realised that he was in trouble.

“Often I would just lock myself in the bathroom and cry,” Mo Farah says. For the first few years, the family he worked for didn’t allow him to go to school, but later, when he was about 12 years old, he got admission in Year 7 at Feltham Community College. At the school, his PE teacher, Alan Watkinson, noticed a change in the young boy when he hit the athletics track as compared to his other classes. Sir Mo says, “The only thing I could do to get away from this (living situation) was to get out and run”. He eventually told Mr Watkinson the truth about his background and the family he was being forced to serve.

Citizenship

Mr Watkinson contacted social services and helped Mo Farah to be looked after by another Somali family. When Mo wanted to participate in school athletics, he required British citizenship. His PE teacher helped with that too.

In the BBC documentary, barrister Allan Briddock informs that Sir Mo’s nationality was technically “obtained by fraud or misrepresentations” and under British law, the government can remove a person’s nationality if their citizenship was obtained through fraud. However, a Home Office official told BBC News it would not take action over Sir Mo Farah’s nationality.