At 09:15, in Debar, police officers from the Sector for International Police Cooperation, Target Search Unit, detained A.M. (33), who had escaped from the "Idrizovo" correctional facility.

He is serving a five-year sentence for an offence under Article 215 of the Criminal Code - unauthorised production and distribution of narcotics, psychotropic substances and precursors. After being detained, he was handed over to police officers from the Debar Department of Internal Affairs for further proceedings.

What the statement does not say

The interior ministry did not disclose how long he had been at large. Nor did it say how he was found, or where he had been hiding all that time. The statement ends exactly where every question worth asking begins.

The fact that the search was run by the Sector for International Police Cooperation is the one detail that tells you something - that is the unit which works with foreign services. Whether it means A.M. had been outside the country is not claimed by the statement, and we will not claim it either.

Who gets out of Idrizovo

Every statement like this is good news and bad news at once. Good, because the man is back. Bad, because it confirms that somebody got out.

"Idrizovo" prison is the largest correctional facility in the country. When someone leaves it without a court releasing them, that is not a story about the police who caught them. It is a story about the institution they walked out of.

The arrest in Debar was over in a few minutes. The question nobody asks out loud is who examines the period between the escape and those few minutes - and whether a report on it exists that anyone actually reads.