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Britain’s greatest long distance runner has said he was trafficked into the UK when he was around eight or nine (top image) and spent his early years as a domestic slave for a woman he had never met before. In a BBC documentary (left), The Real Mo Farah, which will be broadcast tomorrow night, the father-of-four apologises for lying about his identity and the deception in his 2013 autobiography. He was given British citizenship in 2000, given a CBE in 2013 and then knighted by the Queen in 2017 under his false name. He cries as he tells the film: ‘Most people know me as Mo Farah, but it’s not my name or it’s not the reality. The real story is I was born in Somaliland, north of Somalia, as Hussein Abdi Kahin. Despite what I’ve said in the past, my parents never lived in the UK.’ He adds: ‘The hardest thing is admitting to myself that someone from my own family may have been involved in trafficking me. What really saved me… was I could run’. Sir Mo, whose eldest son is Hussein (together right) – now revealed to be his true name – has revealed that he had to cook, clean and wash the unnamed mother’s children ‘if I wanted food in my mouth’. He says the woman, who is still believed to living in Hounslow, told him: ‘If you ever want to see your family again, don’t say anything’. ‘Often I would just lock myself in the bathroom and cry’. But despite his own admission that he was an illegal immigrant whose British nationality was obtained by fraud, he was today assured by the Home Office that they will not strip him of his British citizenship or deport him from his Surrey mansion after the star athlete revealed he had been living a lie. One of Priti Patel’s officials has said that ‘no action whatsoever will be taken against Sir Mo and to suggest otherwise is wrong’.
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