Bitola Stayed Silent for Four Days, Then Issued a Denial: What Happened in the Hours Nobody Will Explain

Four days of silence, then a two-sentence statement. That is all the people of Bitola got about the death of a 39-year-old man from Strumica found dead in the yard of the Clinical Hospital, and about the video that turned the whole of Macedonia around in the meantime.

The Interior Ministry announced that the identity of the people in the video circulating on social media has been established and that several people have been called in for questioning. And that - this is the key sentence - the deceased J.I. found in the hospital yard is not the man being dragged down Širok Sokak by another person in the footage.

So we have two things. A beating reported on 31 August at 03:45 near a hotel on Širok Sokak. And a dead body found afterwards in the hospital yard. The ministry says these are not the same people. Fine. And what happened in the hours in between?

That is exactly the part left blank. The man was examined at the hospital that night, then left. The body was found the next day. Between those two moments there is an interval nobody has yet filled with facts. An autopsy has been ordered by a public prosecutor, the material goes to the prosecutor's office, and that is it.

Why four days?

The footage was no secret. It was everywhere - on Facebook, in group chats, on half the city's phones. People watched a man dragging another man down a street in the centre of Bitola and asked what had happened. The institution that holds the answer stayed quiet for four days, then came out with a denial instead of an explanation.

A denial is the easy part. "That is not the same man" requires no investigation, only a comparison of two faces. The explanation - who the man in the video is, who was dragging him, why, whether a crime was committed - that requires work. And that is still missing.

When an institution leaves a gap, somebody else fills it. For four days social media wrote the script instead of the police. Do we really think that is an accidental consequence rather than a predictable one?