Five years of investigation. A closed pre-investigation. Fourteen people who never came home from the modular hospital in Tetovo. And silence from the man whose party was in power at the time.

The prosecution has closed the pre-investigation into the public procurement of the 19 modular hospitals, after finding insufficient evidence of a criminal offence connected to the procurement itself. That is the formal epilogue. The questions, as those asking them point out, are not closed with it.

Who is silent and who is asking

VLEN and VREDI want answers from Ali Ahmeti and DUI. There are none.

"In the face of the tragedy in which 14 people died in Tetovo, their silence continues," their statement reads. The demand is direct: Islam Abazi, who now heads the Prosecutor's Office for Organised Crime and Corruption, should publicly and fully explain how such a conclusion was reached.

The second point is political, and harder to sidestep: "Ali Ahmeti cannot behave as if this issue does not politically concern DUI. The tragedy happened in the period when his party was in power, and today, after five years of investigation, the victims' families are still facing a large number of unanswered questions."

A closed case is not an answered question

Here it is worth drawing the distinction that press releases blur. The closed case concerns the procurement - how the hospitals were bought, at what price, from whom. Separately from that, there are already final convictions of former hospital directors over failures in fire safety.

So somebody has already been held to account. But for something else - not for the decision to buy and install these buildings exactly as they were.

And that is the point where criminal liability and institutional accountability part ways. The prosecution determines whether there is enough evidence of a criminal offence. That is not the same as the question of who approved the standards, who signed the specification, who carried out the oversight, and why.

Closing the case does not prove that no offences were committed. Only that prosecutors did not find enough evidence to pursue them. The difference between those two sentences is the difference between legal and political accountability - and it is in exactly that crack, five years on, that the families are still standing.

What is missing is not a new investigation. What is missing is an explanation that someone will sign with their own name.