Ante Gotovina (born 12 October 1955) is a Croatian retired lieutenant general and former French senior corporal who served in the Croatian War for Independence. In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted him on a number of war crimes and crimes against humanity charges for crimes committed in 1995 during and in the aftermath of Operation Storm. After spending four years in hiding, he was captured in the Canary Islands in December 2005. In April 2011, Gotovina was found guilty on eight of the nine counts of the indictment and sentenced to 24 years of imprisonment. On 16 November 2012, he was found not guilty on all charges by the appeals panel at the ICTY, and immediately set free. A Croatian government plane flew the general home, where he received a hero's welcome across all of Croatia

War crimes indictment
In July 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) issued sealed indictments to the Croatian government seeking the arrest of Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač for war crimes. Gotovina was indicted together with Markač, a former commander of the special police of Croatia's interior ministry, and Ivan Čermak, assistant defense minister from 1991 to 1993. The three were accused of aiding and abetting the murders of 324 Krajina Serb civilians and prisoners of war by "shooting, burning and/or stabbing" them and forcibly displacing almost 90,000 Serb civilians. Gotovina was charged with five counts of crimes against humanity (persecutions, deportation, inhumane acts, murder) and four counts of violations of the laws or customs of war (plunder, wanton destruction, murder, cruel treatment). He denied all charges. For four years, 2001–2005, Gotovina remained at large despite intense pressure from the United States and the European Union for his surrender. Foreign countries sought to track down Gotovina, and an Interpol warrant was issued for his arrest. The United States announced a $5 million (€4.2 million) reward for his capture. It was reported that the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) had sought to find Gotovina but that it had been thwarted after its intelligence officers were exposed in the Croatian media, allegedly at the behest of Gotovina's allies in one of Croatia' many intelligence services, the POA (Protuobavještajna agencija or "Counter-Intelligence Agency"). The resulting scandal led to the sacking and replacement of POA head Franjo Turek. Several EU member states, including the United Kingdom and the Netherlands made the surrender of Gotovina a precondition for Croatia's accession to the European Union. This stance was criticised by the Croatian government, which claimed that it did not know where Gotovina was, that he was probably outside the country and that it was doing all it could to bring him to justice. Accession negotiations with the EU, scheduled to start on 17 March 2005, were postponed pending a resolution of the issue. In September 2005, ICTY's chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte claimed she had information that he was hiding in a Franciscan monastery in Croatia or in Bosnian Croat territory. She went to the Vatican to ask for help in locating him, but told The Daily Telegraph that Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo had refused to help, telling her that the Vatican was not a state and thus had "no international obligations". Her comments infuriated the Church in Croatia as well as the Vatican, whose spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the archbishop asked Del Ponte what evidence she had to her claims, but she didn't provide any. Del Ponte was later criticized for making self-contradictory statements about Gotovina's whereabouts in September 2005. Croatia's bid for accession was finally accepted in October 2005 as part of a deal with Austria and some other countries, which gained Croatia's admission in exchange for dropping its opposition to Turkey's candidacy. The ICTY announced at the same time that Croatia was then "cooperating fully" with the tribunal, but did not provide further details.

Trial
At the end of 2006 Gotovina's case was joined with cases against Ivan Čermak and Mladen Markač as it relates to the same events (Operation Storm). The Trial of Gotovina et al was expected to begin in May 2007 but was postponed indefinitely due to conflicts between lawyers on the defence bench. Gotovina's lawyers were Luka Misetic, an American attorney of Croatian descent, Greg Kehoe, the American lawyer who advised the prosecution in the Iraqi Special Tribunal case against Saddam Hussein, and Payam Akhavan, former Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor's Office of the ICTY. Following the 2006 death of Slobodan Milošević (who was imprisoned in ICTY prison cell just next to that of Gotovina), Ante Gotovina signed a condolence note to his family (together with Mladen Naletilić Tuta, Paško Ljubičić, Ivica Rajić and other Croat and Serb detainees, making the list 34 signatures long) which was published in Belgrade's Politika and Večernje novosti newspapers. Gotovina's attorney stated he signed because of his Catholic faith which stresses forgiveness. The trial began on 11 March 2008, and concluded in September 2010 with the delivery of closing arguments. Misetic said he expected a verdict in two to 10 months' time, as has been the case with the tribunal's decisions to date.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Gotovina