Footage of a physical altercation at Skopje International Airport spread across social media. One of the videos shows a chair flying through the air during the fight, while several people try to pull the participants apart. Today the interior ministry confirmed the footage is authentic and stated who was involved.

According to the police statement, on 20 September at 19:10 the Skopje police department received a report that public order at the airport had been disturbed by a physical altercation, following an earlier argument, between B.T., aged 20, from Tetovo and B.A., aged 42, from Kumanovo, in which a blunt object was also used. Once the case is fully documented, they say, an appropriate filing will follow.

What the statement does not say

With those two sentences the ministry confirmed the footage. But the list of unknowns is still longer than the list of knowns. It does not say what caused the argument. It does not say whether either man was injured, or how badly. It does not say whether anyone was detained. It does not even say where at the airport this happened - in the public area or behind the security checkpoint.

That last question is not a detail. If a fight involving a blunt object took place in a part of the airport under a security regime, that is an entirely different story from a row in a car park. The difference between those two scenarios changes the accountability question too - who provides the security, how fast they reacted, and whether they reacted at all before the footage reached the internet.

Note the sequence as well. The incident is on 20 September. The footage appears online. Only then, once the video had spread, does the statement arrive. Which means the public learned about it from a bystander's phone, not from an institution.

The ministry says the case is being documented and that an appropriate filing will follow. That is standard phrasing which can mean a misdemeanour charge, and can equally mean a criminal one. When the answer comes, there probably will not be a video to accompany it - and that is exactly when we will see how much attention the case got once it stopped being viral.