Aleksandar Janev, director of the Bureau for Public Security, arrived in Prilep with a line ready-made for the headlines: "The myth of the untouchables in Prilep has finally fallen." The numbers he brought are more serious than the slogan: 37 locations searched, a criminal complaint against 21 people, 14 suspects in detention for up to 30 days and four more under house arrest.

The last, 37th location was neither a flat nor a warehouse, but a bank safe deposit box in Prilep. Police found more than 50,000 euros in it, and motor vehicles were also seized. The operation began on 30 September, after a months-long investigation, in Prilep, Skopje and Struga. According to the Interior Ministry, a 21-member group - 20 people from Prilep and one from Skopje - suspected of drug trafficking and economic crime has been broken up.

Four searches at police officers' homes

Janev volunteered the most awkward detail himself: of the 37 searches, four were of police officers employed at the Prilep Department of Internal Affairs. They are not included in the criminal complaint against the 21, because their cases are being handled by the Interior Ministry's internal affairs unit. In other words, some of the suspicion leads straight to the people who were supposed to be going after the network.

According to Janev, the suspects spent more than 15 years building the network for selling and distributing drugs. Fifteen years is a long run of "untouchability". Who was watching and didn't see? So far, that question doesn't appear in a single statement.

The director announced a stepped-up police presence in Prilep and urged citizens not to be "silent bystanders". Police will also seek cooperation from bar and restaurant owners, of whom Janev believes "surely a large part" have had dealings with the suspects. That's an interesting admission. If the bar owners knew, how did the institutions not know for years?

In the same statement, Janev claims the security situation in Prilep is "favourable" and that serious crime is falling. Those two sentences sit calmly side by side only in a police briefing: a network that, according to the police themselves, has been selling drugs for more than 15 years, and a town that is statistically tranquil.

The investigation continues and, according to Janev, new suspects can't be ruled out. The court's measures are there to secure attendance, they are not verdicts - everyone involved is, for now, a suspect. The real test of the "fall of the myth" won't be the number of searches, but whether the case makes it to a courtroom - including for the four in uniform.