The chief suspect in the murders of 44 people at an engagement party in Turkey planned to kill all guests to ensure that no one remained to take revenge, according to a leaked police statement.

The massacre, the biggest single attack involving civilians that modern Turkey has seen, followed a dispute over land and women.

Police have arrested eight males, including a 14-year-old boy, who all share the same surname as the bride-to-be, Sevgi Celebi. She was killed along with the prospective groom and the Muslim cleric leading the ceremony.

The men were believed to be members of a state-backed militia set up to combat Kurdish separatism and probably used government weapons to kill.

The Hurriyet newspaper said that the chief suspect, Abdulkadir Celebi, told police: “We decided to exterminate all families there. We were also going to kill those who were not in the village at the time. If we did not kill everyone, including women and children, then they would have killed one of us in the future and there would have been a blood feud.”

The suspect said that his side of the family had asked for Sevgi Celebi, whose father had been the village headman, to be given to them in marriage as penance for an earlier rape. “But they gave her to one of our enemies. We told them to cancel the engagement or else.”

Another newspaper, Vatan, said that Abdulkadir Celebi had acted with his four sons and three other relatives. It said that he also had a grievance over land. Many former village residents had deserted the area because of the Kurdish war, leaving the land to the state-backed families who argued over the spoils, it said. As the fighting had died down former residents had tried to return only to be embroiled in land disputes, often with village guards.

Broken windows, walls riddled with bullets and bloodstained carpets are all that remain of the engagement party now. The village of Bilge, a scattering of stone and brick single-storey huts near the city of Mardin, is surrounded by armoured personnel carriers and paramilitary troops. The bodies of the victims — mainly women and children, including three pregnant women and a baby — were buried in a row. The wailing of mourners was heard across the surrounding plains.

Besir Atalay, the Interior Minister, said: “This was not a spur of the moment attack. It cannot be explained by mere rage. It was well planned.”

Government and opposition MPs have called for a review of the controversial policy of creating village guards to combat the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels, which critics have long warned would lead to a bloodbath.

Village guards are paid a monthly salary, given guns and sometimes taken on operations by the army. They often use their status and weapons to give them more muscle in local land and honour disputes.

The fight against the separatist PKK has claimed at least 40,000 lives in the past 25 years, making violence a regular feature of southeast Turkey.

Until now, village guard violence had been limited to land grabs and individual murders. Mr Atalay said recently that that there were 71,907 guards; 975 have been sacked for misconduct. Anecdotal evidence and independent research, however, shows that thousands of guards have been involved in murder, organised crime, drug trafficking, rape and raids on villages.

Rustem Erkan, of Dicle University, said: “Until now tradition has prevented attacks during weddings and funerals. Normally attacks are planned on adults. This is the first time we have seen anything like this. Probably the suspects are village guards. This means we are all responsible. We might not have got our own hands bloody but it has been splattered on our faces.”

Hasip Kaplan, an MP for the pro-Kurdish DTP Party, said: “This is a massacre by the system. If you give villagers Kalashnikovs, this will be the result.”

Conspiracy theories persist, despite the apparent confession by the chief suspect. It has been suggested that rogue groups within the state apparatus, wishing to prolong the Kurdish war, could be behind the systematic killings, in which the masked assailants shot everyone in the head and then went back to finish off survivors.

“If three people had not escaped, then everyone would have said the PKK did this. These men cannot have organised this by themselves,” said a member of the prominent Mardin family.

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