Mo Farah Reveals Childhood Trafficking on TV Show

Sir Mo Farah, the four-time Olympic gold medalist, revealed his harrowing experience of being trafficked to the United Kingdom as a child during an emotional conversation on the April 9 episode of "I'm a Celebrity... South Africa." The 43-year-old athlete, appearing on the ITV all-stars spin-off, shared how he was brought to the UK at age nine from war-torn Somalia under false pretenses, shocking his fellow campmates and prompting tears from reality TV star Scarlett Moffatt.

Farah, whose real birth name is Hussein Abdi Kahin, explained that his story began amid the Somali civil war in the late 1980s. "It was quite a long story, but yeah, I was living in Somalia when I was young, and then the civil war kicked in, and I lost my dad in the war," he told his campmates, including boxer David Haye and singer Ashley Roberts. With eight children to support after his father's death, Farah's mother sent him and his twin brother, Hassan, to an uncle in neighboring Djibouti for safety. Farah believed he was traveling to join relatives in the Netherlands, but a woman he had never met instead flew him to London using false documents and the identity of another child named Mohammed Farah.