Mohamed Farah stands by the roadside, waiting impatiently for passengers to clamber off a blue, rickety bus that has just arrived from Mogadishu Airport.
Suddenly, a boyish grin spreads across his face. She’s here – the woman he’s been waiting to see for three decades. His 59-year-old mother, Leyla Geedi.
This is the first time he has laid eyes on her since that awful day in Nairobi more than 30 years ago, when she tearfully promised her distraught ten-year-old son: ‘I will come back for you’.
Now 42, Mohamed has constantly dreamt of this day, which he captured for posterity in a video seen by The Mail on Sunday. He raises his hands to the sky as if offering thanks, claps softly twice, and gently walks towards her, his arms outstretched. They collapse into each other’s embrace, holding on tightly and rocking tenderly back and forth as tears stream down their faces – smiling through their disbelief that the moment has finally come.
On that day in 1995, Leyla had left him behind, believing that if she made it to Britain a visa would be waiting for her son because his father, Muktar Farah, had gained asylum earlier.
He would be able to join her, she thought, which would break them out of the miserable poverty they had endured in Kenya after fleeing there when the Somali civil war shattered their idyllic lives in their home country.
But, as we revealed in yesterday’s Daily Mail, on arrival in London she discovered to her horror that his visa had been given to and used by another Somali boy: Hussein Abdi Kahin – the future four-time Olympic gold medallist, Sir Mo Farah. So while Sir Mo rose to greatness under Mohamed’s identity, he was condemned to a life of poverty in the war-torn Horn of Africa.
Tragically, this blissful reunion last summer in Mogadishu was only a temporary reprieve. After two precious months together, the day came when they had to part ways – him to his home in Nairobi, and Leyla to the UK.
The real Mohamed Farah in Nairobi. He begged Sir Mo to support his bid for a new life in Britain
Whether they will see each other again depends, in large part, on the Olympic hero whose destiny became entwined with Mohamed’s more than 30 years ago.
Yesterday, in the first part of our investigation, we revealed how Mohamed had discovered that Sir Mo was running under his identity after the athlete’s new-found fame in 2012 prompted scrutiny about his background and set Somali tongues wagging.
His parents had hid the truth from him, worried it would break him, but then some Somalis from London visited Nairobi a year after Sir Mo’s double Olympic gold at the London Games.
While sitting eating traditional Somali rice and goat meat, one of them asked Mohamed: ‘Did you speak to Mo Farah?’
‘I said no, what are you talking about?’ Mohamed recalled. ‘Then he told me. He said: “You know he’s using your name? Your dad took him in, in London.”’
Mohamed’s world crashed down around him. At first he thought it was a joke, but they were serious. He went cold.
‘I could not believe it when they told me,’ Mohamed said. ‘I was so shocked. My mind started spinning and I needed to get away from them to come to terms with what I just learned.’
He dashed back to the tiny single room apartment he shared with two distant relatives in the tough Eastleigh neighbourhood of Nairobi. Despite having no money, earning just £2 a day packing boxes, he had to gather what little he had to get on the phone to his father Muktar. ‘That same night, I called my dad,’ he said. ‘I was hoping he would tell me it wasn’t true but he told me everything.
Sir Mo soared to fame during the London Olympics in 2012, when he won two gold medals
‘He couldn’t even speak to me properly, he was upset and kept on saying he was sorry. He told me it was true, it was not his fault and he tried everything he could to fix it.’
The scales fell from Mohamed’s eyes. ‘I began to have visions of the life I could have lived with my family in the UK instead of being in Nairobi alone,’ he said. ‘This just made it harder… I felt betrayed and I felt so sad.’
Muktar, now 64, told Mohamed he had been ‘tricked’ by his ex-wife, Nimco Akar, now 63, who had bestowed the visa on the future Sir Mo instead of on his own boy. He managed to reason with his son. ‘I calmed down once my dad explained,’ Mohamed said.
He had no ill will to the child who was given his identity, either. Quite the reverse. ‘I wanted him to do well,’ he said. ‘I was proud of him, very proud. What happened isn’t his fault, and it isn’t my fault. We were little children.’
Mohamed made no effort to contact Sir Mo, believing he had no right to interfere in his life.
For Muktar, the revelation was painful to explain as the athlete’s new-found fame had caused another secret to surface.
Just days after his 2012 Olympic victory, The Mail on Sunday tracked down Sir Mo’s twin brother, Hassan, in the self-declared breakaway state of Somaliland. This was the brother left behind in Djibouti when Nimco took Sir Mo in the dead of night to the airport for Britain back in 1993.
The Mail on Sunday also found the runner’s mother and other siblings in the semi-autonomous territory in northern Somalia.
And yet Muktar had been told Sir Mo was an orphan by Nimco. That was why he agreed to pose as his father and let him live in Britain under his real son’s identity, rather than send him back to Somalia with no one to support him.
‘I was shocked,’ Muktar told us from his home in Manchester. ‘I realised my wife had lied to me. She betrayed me. She destroyed my son’s life.’
Mr Farah thought it was a joke when he first heard the Olympic champion was using his name
Sir Mo responded to the scrutiny with a 2013 autobiography, Twin Ambitions, that blended fact with fiction. In it, he maintained that Muktar was his father and claimed his mother – whom he didn’t name – and siblings, were left behind in Somaliland.
Incredibly, despite the truth now being an open secret in the Somali community, this story held for ten years.
Muktar continued to support Sir Mo, not raising any issues with his book and was fine with the athlete putting him down as his father for visa applications. Mohamed, too, did not interfere.
The true story only came to light when Sir Mo decided to reveal it years later in his 2022 documentary, The Real Mo Farah.
In Nairobi, in the meantime, Mohamed continued his hard life – kept sane, in part, because Muktar said Sir Mo would help him one day when the time was right. The athlete has insisted such a promise was never made. By the time the 2016 Rio Olympics came around, Mohamed was still stuck in the Kenyan capital, although he was now renting a modest place of his own.
‘I watched the races at a sports bar, I paid 20 [Kenyan] shillings for a soda to catch it,’ he recalled of seeing the star win double gold again in the 5,000m and 10,000m.
‘I was still supporting him, still very proud. I used to joke, telling people: “I am the real Mo Farah!” But they never believed me.’
The following year, the boy using his identity was knighted to become Sir Mohamed Muktar Jama Farah.
Mohamed recalled: ‘I was so excited, so proud of him. I was always happy for everything he achieved. But my life and his life were day and night. He was living the high life and I was very poor.’
In 2019 Mohamed and his father were reunited in Somaliland – the first time they had met since Muktar left his son in Mogadishu when he was just six months old.
After six healing months together, Muktar went back to the UK, but Mohamed didn’t go home to Nairobi – he had another plan. He was off to university.
Back in London, his mother Leyla had scrimped enough money together to help fund him, working round the clock as an NHS carer on a minimum wage, zero-hours contract.
So, in 2020, Mohamed travelled to Istanbul to study International Relations and Finance at Istanbul Aydin University on a Turkish scholarship. ‘I wanted a new life,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t thinking about Mo Farah any more. I wanted to change my life, finish university, get married, find a good job.’
For Leyla, though the expense was crippling, it was worth it. ‘Each semester was $3,500, and I nearly doubled my hours to help put him through it.
‘I was so happy when he was in Istanbul. I could see he was living a much better life. It was worth every hour I worked.’
But after two years, in May 2022 while deep in his studies, Mohamed received a phone call that changed everything.
‘My aunt Kinsi called me,’ Mohamed said. Kinsi, 70, is Muktar’s sister, and the woman who took in Sir Mo as a child in Britain after Mo complained to social services about his treatment by Muktar’s ex-wife Nimco who’d brought him to Britain.
She told Mohamed that Sir Mo wanted to speak to him. He claims she said the Olympic hero wanted to give him his name back and help him come to the UK. Was this the moment he had been waiting for? The lifeline his father had told him Sir Mo would one day extend?
The four-time Olympic gold medallist has written in support of the ‘real’ Mohammed Farah’s application to come to Britain
The recording of the conversation between the pair played out on Sir Mo’s documentary later that year and shows how the two Mo Farahs bonded over their mutual love of Arsenal.
Mohamed says he would ‘love to come to the UK’. Sir Mo responds, saying: ‘I would personally like to meet you, I will try my best to make that happen.’
He thanks Mohamed for being so decent about his identity being used, and in a touching moment Mohamed responds, telling him, ‘you are my brother’.
But he had no idea what repercussions there would be from the documentary.
Mohamed insisted his sole motivation for participating was because he believed he would be helped to come to Britain. After all, he had never sought the spotlight, nor looked to expose the secret he had known for ten long years. But Sir Mo’s team has insisted the runner had never made any firm commitment.
One can understand why the athlete would be advised to be careful – he did not know anything about Mohamed.
But Mohamed was now under no doubt that the full force of Sir Mo’s fame and fortune would be used to bring him to the UK. His aunt had told him as much.
He claimed it is a promise she made from the start. This is made clear by a voice message sent to Mohamed as the documentary went live, in which Kinsi says: ‘I have spoken to Mohamed [Sir Mo] about helping you. I will help you with everything I can and Mohamed [Sir Mo] has promised to help you and bring you into the country [UK]. This story is not just this, you will enter God willing.’
Either way, when the documentary aired all hell broke loose. As journalists descended on Istanbul to locate Mohamed, Sir Mo’s team told him he needed to hide in a hotel – forcing him to abandon his studies.
‘They told me if you speak to anybody they’ll ruin your story,’ he said. ‘They convinced me – don’t talk to anybody. All I wanted was to be with my family, with my dad, with my mum, who I haven’t seen for 30 years.’
As weeks turned into months, respecting Sir Mo and his Aunt Kinsi’s requests, Mohamed repeatedly refused journalists’ advances, holding out instead for the help promised to him.
Then, with his studies already disrupted, disaster struck. His mother fell ill with Covid. Still on a zero-hours contract, it meant she stopped earning the vital income her son needed. If he didn’t pay his Turkish tuition fees, it violated his student visa and Mohamed would be deported back to Somalia, his country of birth. It was in this state of desperation, Mohamed says, and in the genuine belief Sir Mo was helping his visa case that he reached out to the star for financial support.
‘I was really desperate,’ Mohamed said. ‘He gave me a lot of hope at that time. I was desperate to get to the university so I would ask Mo for help.
Sir Mo has written a letter supporting the ‘real’ Mohamed Farah’s attempt to at last be reunited with his family after the mix-up left him abandoned in Africa over 30 years ago
‘But I now regret asking him.’
Over six months, Sir Mo generously gave him between £3,000 and £5,000.
As for Mohamed’s mother Leyla, she thought it was ‘a blessing’. When she was back to full health, she continued working round the clock to keep her son at university. But soon it dawned on her that while Sir Mo had managed to plug some of the gap, her illness had drained her finances and she would not be able to fund her son’s studies until the end of his course. ‘For two years I was working hard to keep him studying while waiting on Sir Mo’s promise – my hands are damaged because of it,’ Leyla said.
‘I still did not stop because of that hope of reuniting with my son. Each day I would convince myself Mohamed was coming tomorrow.’
Of course, Sir Mo maintains that he never made any promise to help Mohamed come to Britain. Clearly, there was a misunderstanding between the two men.
Agonisingly for Mohamed, the athlete would take longer and longer to reply to him. Mohamed asked a producer on the documentary what to do, and they advised him to keep messaging Sir Mo.
But by December 2023, the superstar stopped responding entirely. ‘After two years, I realised he’s not going to do anything for me,’ Mohamed said. ‘He stopped answering my calls.’
By the following summer, Leyla’s money had run out. With no Kenyan paperwork, Mohamed was deported back to Mogadishu – one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where he had not lived since he was eight years old.
Clearly sticking out on the mean streets of the Somali capital, within a month he was mugged at gunpoint for his phone.
Mohamed recalls: ‘I thought I was going to die. In Mogadishu, people can die at any moment. There is no one you can trust.’
Just a few months later, his world collapsed completely. A story was published in the British Press, quoting sources close to Sir Mo who accused Mohamed of ‘hounding’ the star for money.
‘It broke me,’ Mohamed says, his eyes filling with tears. ‘Even now, I’m broken. I don’t know if I’m going to recover. I don’t even know who to trust any more.’
How had it all gone so wrong? Mohamed had thrown everything into breaking out of poverty in Istanbul, and then it appeared an intervention from Sir Mo would finally give him the break he had been cruelly denied all his life.
He repeated the feat in Rio. The Olympian has put his name to a letter that could see Mohamed begin a life in the UK
But now he was broken, alone and trapped in Mogadishu. The article appeared to be a death knell for his chances of ever seeing his family again – after he was wrongly accused of hounding a national sporting hero and knight of the realm.
It was in this desperate state that Mohamed finally agreed to trust the Mail to tell his full story for the first time. On hearing what had befallen him, we agreed to help fly his mother, Leyla, to see him again after three decades apart and together we would unravel the truth of Sir Mo’s incredible journey from civil war to Olympic gold.
After that blissful meeting in Mogadishu, mother and son immediately got out of Somalia and travelled back to Eastleigh in Nairobi. It was here that we met them travelling around their old haunts. Mohamed would tenderly help his mother put on her shoes each morning and hold her when the emotion got too much. It was as if they had spent a lifetime together.
To help Mohamed, we also put him in contact with human rights lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie, of Leigh Day, who has been the UK’s leading advocate for victims of the Windrush scandal.
His case is unbelievably challenging, but in a virtual meeting with Mohamed, Ms McKenzie explained there is one thing that would be crucial for his bid to come to Britain. ‘A letter from Mo Farah would make this case very special,’ she said, outlining her plan to write directly to the Home Secretary given the exceptional circumstances.
‘It’s not a deciding factor, but it will go a long way because of who he is. His voice would be powerful – very, very powerful.’
After this meeting, agonisingly, it was time for Leyla to depart. This could be the last time she ever sees her son. ‘I can’t describe how I am feeling right now,’ Leyla said as she made her way to Nairobi Airport. ‘I feel so sick at the thought of leaving my son who I have been away from for 30 years.’
They hugged for what seemed like an eternity, both drenched in tears, not wanting to let go of one another. But soon they had to.
Sir Mo with his wife, Tania Nell, at Ascot in 2018. He moved to the UK from Kenya as a child
‘Now I am back alone again,’ Mohamed said, inconsolable, as he made his way back to the car.
The following morning, it was time for the Mail to depart. But before we did, Mohamed asked if he could record one final message in a video. A last attempt to reconcile with Sir Mo.
Speaking in his native Somali tongue, and staring down the camera, he said: ‘Mohamed, brother, the first time I spoke to you I told you, you are my brother – and still today, you are my brother.’
Telling how he has had ‘the best month of my life’ with his mother, Mohamed went on: ‘But she’s getting older and needs my help and for me to be with her. There is no bad feeling between us and still you will be my brother.
‘So please, this letter is needed for me, I am pleading with you to please sign it so I can be reunited with my parents. I don’t need anything else from you.’
After that, we parted ways. Back in London, we began work pulling together a year’s worth of investigation. Then came the final, and most important, piece of the puzzle – contacting Sir Mo’s team.
At first they were reluctant to engage. But then, as requested by Mohamed, we sent them his video. We waited.
After careful consideration, Sir Mo’s team informed us that he had been moved.
He was understandably reticent to give blanket support to a man he does not know but, as the Mail on Sunday exclusively reveals today, the Olympian has put his name to the supporting letter that could finally see Mohamed begin the new life in the UK denied to him as a child.
Describing the vital impact, Ms McKenzie said: ‘This tips the scales further on Mohamed’s side. Though not a deciding factor, it is very important to have.’
Now, in a tiny single room apartment in Eastleigh in Nairobi, Mohamed waits. More than 30 years after that fateful day in 1993, will the real Mo Farah finally make it to Britain?
‘That’s all I am dreaming about,’ he said.
