The video spread faster than any police statement. A young man drops to the asphalt after a kick to the head, stops moving, and the group keeps beating him with a wooden stick until the stick breaks on his back. It happened at night, around 2:30, on Borče Jovanoski Street in Gostivar. The report reached the Gostivar police station later, on 2 August at 22:20, when 22-year-old A.V. said that he and his friend L.E. had been attacked by three unknown men wielding hard and wooden objects.

Now the ministry has names. Two minors from Gostivar have been called in for questioning and, on a prosecutor's order, had their travel documents seized. The third is V.D. (20) from Skopje, for whom a wire was sent to the Skopje police. Once the case is fully documented, the ministry says, the three will be brought before a pre-trial judge under expedited procedure.

So the institutions can do it. Full documentation, coordination with the duty prosecutor, one day. When the whole country is watching.

The question nobody is asking

The attack happened at 2:30 in the morning. The report was logged that same evening, at 22:20 - nearly twenty hours later. Police "took measures and actions" after the footage had already circulated online and set off an avalanche of reactions. That timeline says something about priorities all on its own: from incident to identification takes time, but from viral to official statement takes hours.

The point is not whether the police acted. They did. The point is what set them in motion. If the answer is public pressure rather than the report itself, then anyone attacked without a camera nearby has grounds to wonder where their case ended up.

Two of the three suspects are minors. That is not a footnote - it is a data point about a town where teenagers think it is normal to keep hitting a man already lying motionless, and never once consider the phones around them. A court will handle them under a separate procedure. Responsibility for the environment that produced them falls to no court at all.