A police officer who tried to stop a van carrying smuggled goods ended up on the asphalt, dragged along by a vehicle. It happened on Friday afternoon on the road from the Blace border crossing towards Skopje, at the spot known as "Vrazhji vir" - eight kilometres from the capital, not somewhere at the end of the world.

The script is familiar. Officers from the Regional Centre for Border Affairs spotted a Volkswagen Transporter with foreign plates, loaded with an assortment of smuggled goods. They signalled it to stop. The driver did not. He kept going.

A short while later the police did manage to stop the van. But at the exact moment they moved to detain the driver, a second vehicle arrived. A man got out and physically attacked one of the officers. Then one of them grabbed the officer by the arm while the other drove - and the man was dragged along the road. When they let go, he fell and was injured.

That second vehicle is the key detail in the whole story. This was not a panicked driver caught in the act. This was logistics. Someone was following, someone was waiting, someone came to pull the cargo out when things went wrong. The smuggling channel clearly has more than one car and more than one man - and it knows exactly what to do when the police turn up.

The Interior Ministry said only that "measures are being taken to clear up the case". We have been reading that sentence for months, on every second incident. What does it mean in practice? Have the men been identified? Have the vehicles been found? What exactly was in the "assortment of smuggled goods" and what is it worth? None of that was said, and all of it is what tells you whether this was a random group or an organised network.

Blace is not some anonymous crossing. It is one of the busiest points towards Kosovo and has long had a reputation as a place where goods pass through more easily than they should. When smugglers are bold enough to attack a uniformed officer eight kilometres from Skopje, that says nothing good about how much they fear the consequences.

The officer will recover. The question that stays open is whether anyone will answer for this - or whether it ends, like so much else, as one more press release without a single name in it.