Sinisa Mihajlovic's best friend destroyed his home in Operation Storm; but he showed his character

Sinisa Mihajlovic has had a difficult life path on which he overcame many difficulties. The last of them was the toughest, when he fought against leukemia, which he bravely tackled and won!

Before that, Sinisa - a former Serbian footballer, now a coach - survived a difficult moment in his youth, when he lost his home due to the war in Croatia, which was burned down by his best childhood friend, called Stipe, after Operation Storm.

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Five years later, Sinisa came face to face with the man who burned down his family home and shot at his photograph that was hanging on the wall.

In his autobiography, Mihajlovic described what the meeting with Stipe looked like five years later in Zagreb, when the Yugoslav national football team played against Croatia.

Sinisa's former friend, whom he saw as a brother, asked him for forgiveness. And he received it, because Mihajlovic showed even then what a great person he is, ready to forgive even the most serious crimes.

"Pressured by me, my parents packed their bare necessities and moved to Belgrade. My brother Drazen joined us. Later, the news reached us that our house in Borovo (in Croatia) was mined and that someone fired a bullet into my picture on the wall. There was a certain symbolism in that awful act, the message was more than clear. Who could have thrown a bomb at our house? Who shot at my and Drazen's picture, and why?

Those questions haunted me until I finally found out the truth. That was done by Stipe, one of my best friends from childhood, whom I saw as a brother. We saw each otheragain  in 2000 in Zagreb. He came to my hotel and asked me if I knew about everything. He admitted to me that he had set fire to the house, but also saved my parents. I forgave him," Mihajlovic said in the book "God's Left (foot)" written by Miroslav Gavrilovic in 2012.

(Telegraf.rs/Telegraf.co.uk)