A safe holding gold jewellery, weapons and ammunition, carried out of a house in Dolno Palchishte. Value: around 160,000 euros. That's the biggest hit in a string of burglaries over which the Tetovo police department has now filed criminal charges against four people.

Those charged are E.V. (43) and E.A. (34) from Nikushtak, A.A. (34) from Otlja, all from the Municipality of Lipkovo, and H.A. (53) from Kosovo. They are accused of ten offences: four counts of "aggravated theft" and six of "attempted aggravated theft".

The police list reads like a route map. The safe vanished on 19 September. In the same village, back at the end of last November, gold jewellery and cash worth around 70,000 euros were taken from another house. On 10 May a safe was forced open at a sports betting shop in Tearce, and between 23 and 26 May several cartons of cigarettes disappeared from a petrol station storeroom in Pirok.

Between April and September, according to the charges, the suspects broke into houses and premises in Kamenjane, Dolno Palchishte, Nerashte, Tearce and Radiovce six more times, searched them - and left empty-handed. The two burglaries in Dolno Palchishte alone add up to around 230,000 euros.

The burglaries are the work of people who chose to commit them, and the charges now name them by their initials. A court will decide who is guilty. But the timeline raises another question: ten months passed between the first and the last burglary in the same village. How long did it take for someone to connect the dots?