North Macedonia's opposition is calling for ministers to resign because a Bulgarian woman on trial in Kocani over a fatal crash is in Bulgaria. A court had taken her Macedonian and Bulgarian passports and banned her from leaving the town, BTA reported.

This follows our earlier report on Iva Mihaylova, who is in Pirogov hospital. Interior minister Ivan Demerdzhiev said the Interior Ministry will question her on how she crossed the border.

The opposition SDSM party wants interior minister Pance Toskovski to resign. In a video statement, the party's Keti Sterjova insisted that everyone who let the woman go must answer for it. She said the first political responsibility lies with Toskovski, because he released her and she left the country without her two passports.

SDSM links the case to foreign minister Timco Mucunski's visit to Sofia last week. The party says that since then, people can see what was agreed in secret. "People are not naive. This was agreed," Sterjova said.

Sterjova noted that the woman says publicly that she crossed the border legally with an ID card and that border guards knew about it. The Interior Ministry says no exit was recorded. In her view, the border must stop both criminals and people fleeing justice.

The platform "12.05", an opposition group inside SDSM, called for the immediate resignation of three ministers: Toskovski, Mucunski, who is in charge of foreign affairs and foreign trade, and justice minister Jeton Shaqiri. It called on the European Commission to ask Sofia to stop its "provocations" and to hand the woman over to the Macedonian courts at once.

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) believes the defendant should now also answer for a new offence. It called the messages from Sofia "scandalous" and said they show a "total blackout" over the rule of law and the European justice system.

The LDP statement reads: "In North Macedonia you can kill, steal, destroy and then walk freely abroad and be photographed as a victim." The party also sees in the daily scandals a collapse of state institutions and a "system of injustice". It said the case disregards "the ethnic connotation" and the "boiling nationalist-chauvinist heads in the region", which run "ethnopopulist campaigns over human tragedies".

The LDP says the defendant's lawyer committed offences against Bulgarian and Macedonian justice when he said she had "taken her fate into her own hands". "What a legal disaster!" the party wrote.

The LDP wants the state to have a police force that works, cameras at border crossings and services that track where people with confiscated passports and exit bans are. Otherwise, it says, everything is a "dysfunctional farce". The party points out that the ruling parties hold all legislative power, a constitutional majority, control of local government, dominance in the media and full access to security cameras.

Analyst Rabi Sedrak, who has worked on border security projects, believes it is impossible for the woman to have crossed the way she claims. He says it would take at least 8 people on both sides to arrange it, and the Frontex mission would have to be involved.

He personally thinks it is more likely that she entered by illegal or unofficial routes, of the kind migrants use on the Balkan or Mediterranean routes.