Three Sputnik employees attacked and threatened in Ankara

Sputnik Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan tweeted about attack on three agency’s staffers day after a protest was held outside Russian General Consulate in Istanbul amid deterioration of situation in Syria’s Idlib.

Organized groups of people broke into homes of Sputnik employees in Ankara at about 10:30 p.m. local time on Saturday, shouting nationalist chants, insults and threats.

According to the agency's staff members, the attackers were trying to break the apartment doors.

They chanted slogans including “Turkey for the Turks”, “Homeland is indivisible”, threatened the Sputnik employees and called them “traitors” and “Russian spies”.

The attackers managed to flee the scene before police arrived. Each group of attackers contained up to ten people, the Sputnik employees later said.

No one was injured as a result of the incident.

Sputnik editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan took to Twitter to comment on the incident, raising the question of how "ghouls" were able to obtain Sputnik staffers' addresses.

“Some ghouls have broken into homes (!) of three our employees in Ankara. They were threatening, shouting that they [Sputnik employees] are traitors, because they work for the Russians," she tweeted.

"Let's see how the police respond," she added.