At 05:00 in the morning, in an apartment block in Kisela Voda, someone set fire to the front door of a flat. The owner is a 57-year-old man. Nobody was hurt - but only because the fire was spotted in time.

The same day, police detained a 50-year-old man from Skopje. He has been charged with "causing general danger" under Article 288, paragraph 1 of the Criminal Code.

The cameras caught him, not a miracle

What cracked the case was neither a witness who happened to be passing nor a confession. According to the Interior Ministry, the perpetrator was identified through analysis of secured video footage. He was then interviewed in the presence of the duty prosecutor and a witness who identified him, providing further details of how it was carried out.

A few hours passed between the report and the arrest. That is fast, and it deserves saying.

But it is worth staying with what actually happened here. This is not an argument that got out of hand. Someone decided to walk up to another person's door in a building full of people and set it alight, at five in the morning, when everybody is asleep. The gap between a damaged door and a funeral notice is a few minutes and a slightly weaker draught.

A block of flats is not a duel between two men

In a shared building nobody burns alone. Smoke climbs the stairwell, and that door is part of a structure housing dozens of families who have nothing to do with the dispute, whatever it was.

The police did their job quickly. Now it passes to the court and to the classification - whether "causing general danger" can carry the full weight of what could have happened, or whether it ends as one more case where nobody was injured, so nothing serious is deemed to have followed.