Masked attackers with automatic weapons stormed an engagement party in southeast Turkey yesterday, killing 44 people including the bride to be, her betrothed and several children.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, condemned the massacre, which wiped out nearly a fifth of the village population.

The murders were said to be the result of a family dispute, but others said that there was a political motive.

Turkish media reported that the attackers wanted the bride to marry someone else. Reports said that the families of the engaged man and his fiancée had previously been enemies in a blood fued.

Blood feuds and honour killings are common in the impoverished tribal region, but the systematic nature of the killings and the high toll are unusual for that type of violence.

Relatives sobbed on each others’ shoulders as they told how most of the victims were women, children and elderly men in the small hilltop village of Bilge, in Mardin province near the border with Syria. Three pregnant women and a baby also died.

“My mother, my father, gone. What did they do to anyone?” wailed a 15-year-old boy as a television reporter tried to interview him.

In the village, diggers prepared rows of graves to the background of weeping women.

Sevgi Celebi, the daughter of a former village headman, was celebrating her engagement to Habib Ari when the attack took place.

The Turkish state-run Anatolia news agency said that the masked attackers wanted Ms Celebi to marry someone in their clan and her family had resisted their advances.

Police said last night that eight men had been detained. They were said to have the same name as one of the families.

The shooting lasted for 15 minutes. Many people in the village said that they took no notice at first as celebratory gunfire is common in rural Turkish celebrations.

“I have seen lots of bodies — some no longer had faces. It’s obvious explosives were used,” said Tarik Kalkan, who lost his sister. He said that the five or six attackers fired systematically from windows and doors.

Guests were herded into the corner of a room and sprayed with bullets. Two girls survived under a pile of their friends’ bodies. A group of men were killed while praying with the village imam, who also died.

Officials ruled out links with the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has attacked the village in the past because most of its population are village guards, paid and armed by the state in the 25-year struggle against the separatists.

The 57,000 village guards in southeast Turkey are part of a controversial policy established in 1985, which critics say allows families in the region to use their status and government resources to settle family disputes and grab land.

The village was particularly vulnerable, residents said, because many men had been called away on a night operation by the security forces.

Taraf, the controversial independent newspaper, questioned the official account and suggested that the attack could be linked to shady outfits within the security forces at a time when the PKK has been seeking to end hostilities.

Critics regularly point out that the battle in the south east has become a lucrative source of money, providing cover for drugs and arms deals.

The attackers, under the cover of a sandstorm, apparently took the trouble to burst the tyres of all vehicles that they passed as they escaped.

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