The upper deck of bus number 25 caught fire as the vehicle was returning from Middle Vodno. There were no passengers - the bus was coming back empty. The driver reacted in time and prevented a bigger disaster.

A few hours later, another city transport bus broke down at the junction of Kliment Ohridski and Teodosij Gologanov boulevards, in the very centre of Skopje. The opposition SDSM published a video showing the driver pouring some liquid in at the back and accused the company of letting the vehicle run out of fuel.

"It is obvious that the chaos in the public company has not been overcome, so due to poor planning the bus ran out of fuel," the party said, calling on mayor Orce Gjorgjievski "to stop making excuses".

The denial is technical, and it is correct

The Skopje public transport company rejected the accusations as entirely false, with an argument that leaves no room for interpretation:

"The MAN vehicles, to which the published footage and photographs refer, use methane as fuel, which makes it impossible for them to be refuelled from jerrycans in the street, as is groundlessly claimed. In this specific case it was a minor technical fault - a burst hose, from which a small amount of antifreeze leaked."

A methane bus is not filled from a jerrycan. That is physics, not politics. The party that pushed the claim could have checked it in ten minutes before publishing.

But here is the problem with episodes like this. When a party fires off an accusation that does not hold water, the real damage is not taken by the company - it is taken by the next genuine question, which will now be dismissed as more party point-scoring.

And the genuine question was asked the same day

LDP leader and MP Monika Zajkova framed it without a party video and without a jerrycan:

"Today a double-decker city bus caught fire on Vodno. Fortunately there are no casualties. And what if there had been people inside?! Would that have been another 'tragedy', another day of mourning, another 'we will investigate the causes' and again nobody at fault."

She then put the questions institutions have to answer: who inspects the buses that carry thousands of citizens every day, when were they last serviced and how, who guarantees they are technically sound, who signs off that they are safe.

Zajkova also recalled that a year ago she publicly warned about the safety of the Vodno cable car and asked whether a tragedy had to happen before anyone took responsibility. The cable car, she says, is still closed.

"We cannot keep living from one lucky break to the next. Today the driver reacted in time and prevented a bigger disaster. Tomorrow we may not be so lucky," she said.

The denial covers only one vehicle

The company is appealing to everyone publishing information not to make unverified claims, particularly when it comes to the safety and technical condition of the vehicles. The appeal is justified.

But a denial about a burst hose answers one question - whether the bus ran out of fuel. It does not answer the other one: why the upper deck of a vehicle from that same fleet burned on the same day. On that there is still neither a statement nor a deadline for findings.