68 Kilograms of Cocaine in a Macedonian Driver's Truck in France: the Tip-Off Came From Macedonian Police

At the Fontaine toll station in France, 68 kilograms of cocaine were seized from a lorry driven by a 44-year-old Macedonian citizen with the initials M.F. The French didn't find the truck on their own. The information came from Skopje.

According to the Interior Ministry, the operational intelligence was gathered by the Illicit Drug Trafficking Unit of the Criminal Police Department and passed to the French authorities through the International Police Cooperation Sector and Europol. The ministry calls this the second successful international operation in a month, after cooperation with Greek police ended with the seizure of 324 kilograms of marijuana.

The cooperation clearly works, and that should be said. But the statement tells only half the story. Who loaded the truck, where it set off from and who the cargo was meant for - on that the statement says nothing, and without those answers 68 kilograms of cocaine remain a number on a table, not a network in front of a judge.

If Macedonian police know enough to tell France which truck to open, do they also know enough about the people who sent it? That's the question that will show whether this was an operation or just a good press release.