In under 24 hours, police foiled two separate attempts to smuggle migrants in the south of the country - and in both cases the story is identical: a vehicle with fake plates, foreign nationals crammed inside, and a driver profiting off someone else's desperation.

The first case happened on 21 July around 12:25. Officers at the border crossing stopped a 35-year-old man from Strumica driving an „Audi A5" with fake Kavadarci plates. Inside were five Afghan migrants, along with Albanian documents and a car rental contract - the full kit of a well-oiled channel.

That same day around 17:50, on the Gradsko - Prilep expressway, police tried to stop a „Mercedes" with Skopje plates. The driver didn't stop. Instead he sped up, lost control near Kruševica and slammed into an embankment. In and around the vehicle, two Pakistani migrants were found injured; they were taken to the Kavadarci hospital and then placed in the „Gazi Baba" reception center for foreigners. This time the flight from police almost ended in deaths - refugees the driver left to carry their own injuries.

The third man detained was caught early in the morning of 22 July, around one o'clock, when police stopped a „Golf" on the same stretch. All the suspects face criminal charges for human smuggling.

Three arrests in a single day sounds like a success - and on one level it is. But let's not fool ourselves: what the police caught is only the part that surfaced. The fake plates, the rented vehicles, the prepared documents - this isn't amateur improvisation, it's the routine of a network that knows exactly what it's doing. The question left unanswered is who stands above the drivers who fall into police hands, and whether anyone ever reaches them at all.