What appears to be a coordinated attack on Sputnik employees in the Turkish capital was first reported by Margarita Simonyan, RT and Sputnik’s Editor-in-Chief on Saturady, and later confirmed by the agency itself.

Simonyan tweeted that three separate groups, each numbering about 10 hooligans, swooped on the flats of three agency’s employees, hurling threats and accusing them of betraying their homeland, Turkey, for doing journalistic work for the Russian outlet.

“They were shouting: ‘Turkey for the Turks!’ ‘Traitors!’ and ‘Russian spies!'”, Simonyan tweeted, comparing the raids to the pogroms against ethnic Armenians by Turks in the Ottoman Empire.

“My great-grandmothers would have experienced a déjà vu now.”

Simonyan noted that it she was now awaiting a police response to the assaults, adding that it’s unclear at the moment how the perpetrators obtained the home addresses of “not the most public of our employees.”

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