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Kamaru Usman (extreme right) and his father (second from left) (Image via @usman84kg Instagram)

Why did Kamaru Usman's father go to jail? Here's the inside story of the UFC star's family

Kamaru Usman came over to the United States at the age of eight along with his parents. His father, Muhammed Usman, took up a career in pharmaceuticals in the USA. However, the profession eventually landed him in prison, although Kamaru Usman says his father never committed any crime.

In 2009 when a SWAT team came by and arrested Muhammed Usman. He was taken into custody on charges of multiple false-claim frauds committed by his ambulance company.

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11 months after his arrest, in May 2010, Muhammed Usman was convicted of 14 federal charges. He was sentenced to 180-month prison time and restitution of $1.3 million. He was released in February 2020 from a Texas prison, where he served 10 of the 15 years he was sentenced to. A July 2020 ESPN report talked about Kamaru Usman's mother, Afishetu P. Usman, recalling the day.

However, according to his son, Muhammed committed no crime that should have landed him in prison.

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Kamaru Usman reveals further details about his father's incarceration, questions American justice system

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Kamaru Usman opened up about his father's incarceration for the first time on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He blamed the U.S. justice system for turning a blind eye to his father's innocence because he was an immigrant.

He shared that the real culprits were the paramedics who Muhammed had hired to run his ambulance company. He claimed that his father was sentenced to prison simply because of his 'ignorance', despite said paramedics admitting to the crime:

"One thing that I really haven't really shared with anybody... very, very few people know that my father has been incarcerated since 2009. This is the first time I have really talked about it. My dad was... it goes to test the justice system here, man... it's so crooked and so backwards... My dad was businessman and my dad built one of the very, very big business in Dallas.

Usman added:

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"He owned an ambulance company and... it was one of those situations where my dad hired the people that he thought were the right people to do what he didn't know... they run the company into the ground and now because my dad was the owner of the company, they put it all on him, even though the people that were doing the things that were wrong in the company admitted to doing the wrong things. But what the court said is that 'Oh because you own the company, ignorance is not an excuse, so because of that, we're going to sentence you to 15 years."

Watch the interview below:

Kamaru Usman will fight Khamzat Chimaev in the co-headliner of the UFC 294 PPV event. The fight will mark Kamaru Usman's middleweight debut in the UFC. The winner of the fight will most likely become one of the frontrunners for the middleweight title in near future along with the likes of Dricus Du Plessis and Jared Cannonier.

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Edited by
Anirban Banerjee
 
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