"That's not my job." Five words, spoken on 16 March 2025 outside the entrance of the Kočani nightclub Puls, are now among the heaviest ever heard in the hall of the Basic Criminal Court in Skopje. They were said, according to testimony, by a police officer in uniform. He had been asked to help an injured young man into a car so he could be driven to hospital.

The trial of 13 police officers, charged with grave offences against public safety, started over again yesterday. Not because of new evidence, not because of a new prosecution theory, but because the composition of the judicial panel changed. Everything presented up to that point is simply wiped, and the case begins from page one. For the court, that is procedure. For the parents sitting in that hall, it is one more lap.

The witnesses who took the stand that evening had been inside the club. A student from Kočani described finding his friend outside with an injured knee, driving him to hospital, then going back to the club to help. That is when he asked the officer for assistance. Another witness described the wall falling on his head, pulling a friend out, and after all of it running into the same answer. A third witness said that while she was searching for her father, she was threatened with arrest.

What is actually on trial here

The indictment says those 13 officers, who were carrying out an inspection in the club that night, failed to take the measures they were obliged to take - above all, they did not stop unregistered pyrotechnics being set off on a stage, indoors, with an audience present. The inspection was there. The pyrotechnics were there too. That is the difference between being present and supervising, and that difference is precisely what the indictment is about.

The defence, through lawyer Aleksandar Petreski, argues that the witness statements are vague and contradict each other, and that the prosecution has no concrete evidence. That is a legitimate defence position and it has every right to be argued. But contradictions between accounts given by people fleeing a burning club are not the same thing as contradictions between witnesses to a road accident - and the court will have to weigh exactly that.

The proceedings before judge Fanka Jančuleva Mihailovska resume on 13 October. Which means another three weeks before the next testimony, in a trial that was sent back to the start less than a month ago.

The parents of the dead want one thing: accountability. Not appeals, not press releases, not promises of a systemic approach. Accountability with a first name, a surname and a final verdict. Eighteen months after that night, the court is still reading page one.