BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Serbia said Tuesday that former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, who is being tried for genocide at a U.N. tribunal, should be released provisionally from detention in The Hague, Netherlands, on health grounds.

Serbia's state TV said Tuesday that the government was responding to requests from the defense and family by issuing a guarantee that 74-year-old Mladic would not flee while undergoing hospital treatment in Serbia.

Judges at the Netherlands-based U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia rejected in May a similar defense motion seeking Mladic's release for a medical treatment in Russia.

Mladic had two strokes and a heart attack before he was imprisoned and his lawyers say that his condition has further deteriorated in jail.

Mladic was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after more than a decade on the run. He is charged with genocide for the massacre in Srebrenica of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995 and other atrocities of Bosnia's 1992-95 war.