A 26-year-old was killed less than a hundred metres from a police station. Two men on a motorcycle stopped in front of a shop window in Čair, fired at a group of five young people, and rode on. One bullet hit A.M. (26). Doctors at the Mother Teresa hospital could not save him. And now, a day later, the interior minister steps in front of the cameras with a sentence that says far more than he intends: one of the perpetrators is already serving a prison sentence.

Panče Toškovski said it on television, calmly, as a statement of fact. A man the state had already locked up ended up on a Skopje street with a gun in his hand. "Whether he was released, freed or whatever, it is still too early to go into those details," the minister said. The early phase of an investigation is a comfortable place to hide, but this question does not need an investigation - it needs an administrative report. Who signed, when, and on what grounds.

Toškovski opens that door himself. He spoke about "the problem of the influence of the penitentiary system, that is, the prisons and what happens inside them," and noted that he had recently raised the subject at a conference with the OSCE and foreign diplomats, including the US ambassador. So the problem is being discussed at conferences with ambassadors. On Vojdan Černodrinski Street, meanwhile, people are being shot at.

The numbers versus the feeling

The minister dismissed social-media comparisons to the Wild West and insists violent crime has fallen drastically compared with three years ago, "when organised criminal groups were literally rampaging through the city." He listed the results too: the interior ministry and the public prosecutor's office have cleared seven murders from previous years, six committed in Macedonia and one in the country to the south.

Those are real numbers and they should not be waved away. But the statistics on falling crime and one 26-year-old shot dead on a Saturday night are not competing claims - they simply measure different things. One measures how many cases have been closed. The other measures how safe a man feels standing in front of a shop window in his own neighbourhood.

According to the official police bulletin, five Skopje residents were standing at the junction of Prohor Pčinjski and Vojdan Černodrinski streets when a motorcycle carrying two people pulled up in front of them. They fired, then fled. The prosecutor's office ordered an autopsy and forensic evidence has been collected.

Toškovski says the ministry has initial information on the perpetrators and secured evidence, and that the motive cannot be disclosed for now - but that, according to first findings, this was not a settling of scores between organised groups over territory, but a matter of "some other reasons."

The minister's message was addressed to "all those who think they are untouchable." The problem is that this message has been sent before, repeatedly, over the past two and a half years. The question left open tonight is not whether the perpetrators will be caught - they usually are. The question is how one of them was out there in the first place.