A Turkish opposition lawmaker filed a criminal complaint against Turkey’s powerful interior minister today after he was assaulted by unidentified men as he emerged from an Istanbul restaurant. Baris Atay, who was hospitalized for multiple injuries, said Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu had incited the attack through a threatening tweet. The affair is seen as a further dark page in Turkey’s descent into lawlessness and impunity.

Atay told Tele1 TV, a pro-opposition news channel, that one didn’t “need to be a soothsayer to grasp that the attack was linked to Soylu.” “It was a planned ambush,” he said. Eyewitnesses claimed one of the assailants had filmed the attack on his mobile phone while the rest laid into him before disappearing into separate directions.

 “The interior minister targets a lawmaker. The same night, Baris Atay is attacked. Is [he] an interior minister or a gang leader? It’s impossible to tell,” tweeted Garo Paylan, of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP), echoing anger aired by fellow opposition lawmakers.

The row between the pair erupted online over Musa Orhan, a Turkish serviceman accused of raping an 18-year-old girl who then took her own life and left a suicide note detailing how he’d abused her.