Mitat Ibraimi was a boy from the village of Sredno Konjari (Средно Коњари) near Skopje, North Macedonia. He was born on 1 October 2002 to parents Selajdin (father) and Jeldze (mother), and lived with his family in a rural community outside the capital. He is described as being of Albanian ethnicity, reflecting the mixed Macedonian–Albanian character of that region (Link).

Mitat disappeared on 19 March 2010. According to Macedonian press reports, he was last seen near the Pčinja River (река Пчиња), not far from his home in Sredno Konjari. The exact moment of disappearance is not precisely reconstructed in public reporting: he was playing or moving in the vicinity of the river area, and then simply could not be located. At the time he went missing, he was reportedly dressed in a green tracksuit top, blue jeans and brown boots, a clothing description repeated in later missing-persons compilations based on the Ministry of Interior data.

Initial investigative work treated the case as a probable accidental drowning. Police and search teams, including local residents, focused on the Pčinja River and riverbanks. Contemporaneous coverage notes that authorities suspected he might have fallen into the river, and searched the riverbed and surrounding area, but no body, clothing, or other physical trace was recovered despite those efforts. Within roughly ten days of his disappearance, his case was serious enough that Interpol was notified and involved in the wider search, an unusual step for what was publicly still framed as a possible drowning rather than a confirmed abduction.

The context around Mitat’s case changed dramatically a short time later, when two other children—Mirsada Heldović and Dane Memedi—went missing in the Kumanovo area (Bavči/Sredorek Roma settlements) in late March and April 2010. They too were from an ethnic minority (Roma). Macedonian investigative pieces from 2011 and 2018 discuss all three children together, describing them as having disappeared in “extremely mysterious circumstances,” with no conclusive evidence of drowning or voluntary disappearance in any of the cases. These articles emphasize that, despite international notices, checks in neighboring countries, searches of riverbeds, questioning of witnesses, investigations of suspicious jeeps, and border controls, police were still unable to determine what happened to Mitat, Mirsada, or Dane.