Belgrade, Serbia (CNN) -- Officials will try again Friday to conduct a deportation hearing for Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic who was in a jail near Belgrade facing charges that he presided over Europe's worst massacre since World War II.
Mladic was arrested Thursday after more than 15 years in hiding. Mladic was the highest-ranking fugitive to remain at large after the conflicts that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The deportation hearing is being held to determine whether Mladic will be transferred to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague in the Netherlands.
His lawyer, Milos Saljic, said Mladic's hearing was halted because of health issues and rescheduled for Friday. The lawyer described Mladic as a "ruin of a man" who has suffered two heart attacks and three strokes since 1996.
President Boris Tadic said Serbian authorities are still investigating who aided Mladic during his decade and a half on the run, but he called allegations that the country's military sheltered him "rubbish."
"At the end of the day, he was protected by a very small group of people from his family," Tadic said. He acknowledged that Mladic may have been aided by military officers early on, "but at the end of that process, I don't believe that," Tadic said.
The former Yugoslav army officer was the commanding general of Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-95 war that followed Bosnia-Herzegovina's secession from Yugoslavia. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has charged him with leading a genocidal campaign against Bosnia's Muslim and Croat populations, including "direct involvement" in the 1995 killings of nearly 8,000 men and boys in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica -- the worst European massacre since the Holocaust.
However, Mladic remains a hero to some Serbs, and small outbursts of anger were seen in Belgrade late Thursday.
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