Raids on 32 locations in Skopje, police entered the Interior Ministry's own offices: 25 people suspected over truck and bus licences issued without a single test

Thirty-two locations in Skopje, searched in a single day. Among them - homes, individuals, and the thing that makes this operation different from the rest: official premises inside the Interior Ministry. The police walked into their own house.

The Basic Public Prosecutor's Office in Skopje confirmed the searches are being carried out under warrants from a pre-trial judge, obtained at a prosecutor's request. The charge is "forgery of a document" under Article 378 of the Criminal Code. Dry wording for something that in practice means: driving licences for trucks and buses, issued without a single test taken.

How the scheme worked

According to the investigation, around 25 people are under scrutiny and some have been detained. The mechanism was as simple as it is alarming. A person reports losing their ordinary driving licence. When the replacement is issued, an Interior Ministry employee adds categories C and D - truck and bus - for a fee. No test. No check. The licence is formally entirely valid.

Those caught up in it include ministry employees, but also people who drove buses and heavy goods vehicles on such licences - both inside the country and beyond it. That is a sentence worth reading twice.

Anyone who has driven a Macedonian motorway in recent years has shared a lane with a driver who may never have sat the test for the category they hold. Every parent who put a child on a school trip bus had a man behind the wheel whose training was a matter of price, not examination. Laskarci is not distant history - 16 people died in that bus crash, and the court process is still grinding through the instances.

Who answers for the system, not just for the people

The operation is good news - it means someone on the inside spoke up and the prosecution acted. But the operation is also an admission. If an official could spend years adding categories to a register with no oversight whatsoever, then the problem is not one corrupt employee but a system where doing that leaves no trace anyone is watching.

So far nobody has published the exact number of people involved, how many licences were forged, or how long it has been going on. Those three figures are the only thing that will show whether this was an incident or a practice.