They set off from Skopje airport on Friday evening. The next day, when they no longer answered, a relative from Kosovo reported them missing. Last night, with the help of the „Safe City“ cameras and a police drone, the vehicle was found - overturned on a stretch of the motorway toward Blace that is still under construction and closed to traffic. Inside, three bodies.

The dead are three citizens who lived in Germany - two of Kosovo origin and one from Turkey. The Mercedes smashed and overturned on the unfinished part of the road. At the scene, the doctors could only pronounce death. The public prosecutor and Skopje's department for criminal investigations carried out an inspection, and the bodies were sent for autopsy, which is to clarify the causes of the tragedy.

One detail demands attention and must not get lost in the news cycle: the vehicle ended up on a stretch that is closed to traffic - a motorway that is still being built. How did a vehicle reach a closed section of road at all? What signposting, what physical barrier existed at the entrance to the unfinished stretch? That is not a question for the victims. It is a question for those who opened it, or failed to close it properly, that stretch.

The fact that the vehicle was found by a camera and a drone, and not by a road patrol, also says a lot about how long such places stay invisible. Three people were reported missing for a whole day before they were found - a few kilometres from a main border crossing. The autopsy will show exactly what happened in those hours.

While the investigation runs, the basics remain: an unfinished stretch, closed to traffic, on which three lives nonetheless ended. The responsibility for how a closed motorway became the site of a tragedy must not end with the phrase „the causes are being established by the competent authority“.