Masked gunmen armed with assault rifles and grenades attacked a wedding party in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey, killing at least 44 people, authorities said.
Authorities have detained eight people in connection with the attack, in which four masked men fired bullets and threw hand grenades into the gathering yesterday in the village of Bilge in Mardin province, close to the Syrian border.
Sixteen of the dead were women and six others were children, it was reported.
The attack on Monday evening was one of the worst involving civilians in European Union candidate Turkey's modern history. Interior Minister Besir Atalay said initial evidence did not point to involvement of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
Television broadcasters said there had been a blood feud between two families in the small village in recent years.
The deputy governor of the province of Mardin, Ahmet Ferhat Ozen, told Reuters the assailants stormed a house in Bilge village near Sultankoy, some 20km from Mardin, hurling grenades and opening fire on wedding guests.
"There were a few people, they broke into the house and started spraying the place with bullets, hitting both men and women, their faces were covered with masks," said a 20-year-old female witness.
She said there were some 200 people at the wedding party.
The assailants escaped from the isolated region of Turkey on the border with Syria before soldiers surrounded the village and cut off road access. Pursuit of the attackers was being hindered by a sandstorm, authorities said.
Local media said the families of both the bride and the groom included members of the Village Guard, a heavily armed state-backed militia set up to combat Kurdish separatist guerrillas and provide intelligence in southeast Turkey.
Marriages in the conservative southeast can spark rivalry between clans because the groom and his family must often pay some kind of prize to the bride's family for marriage, and sometimes the highest bidder wins.
The government has improved the rights of women in the region, but the European Union says more needs to be done, including dealing with honour killings.
"No kind of tradition can justify this killing, no conscience can justify this kind of pain," Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said in Ankara.
Reuters