Forty-four people were reported to have been killed tonight when unidentified gunmen opened fire at a wedding reception in south-eastern Turkey. Ahmet Ferhat Ozen, the acting governor of Mardin province, told Reuters that the assailants had stormed a hall in the village of Sultankoy and attacked guests with automatic rifles and hand grenades.
Local media said the families of both the bride and the groom included members of the state-sponsored militia, the Village Guard, which was set up to combat Kurdish separatist guerrillas in the area.
Turkish soldiers and pro-government village guards have been fighting Kurdish guerrillas in the region for years. One Turkish television news channel, NTV, said the attack stemmed from a feud between rival groups of Village Guards.
Ozen said many more people had been wounded, adding that the number of dead could rise. He also said that local paramilitary police had been dispatched to the village to hunt down the attackers.
According to the Cihan news agency, the injured were taken to hospital in Mardin, where they were visited by the city's chief of police.
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels have been fighting Turkish forces in the south-east of the country since 1984 in the battle for a Kurdish homeland. About 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, have been killed in the conflict. However, few individual incidents associated with the conflict have produced death toll as high as the wedding shooting.
Last week, Turkey suffered its worst outbreak of political violence in months when nine soldiers died in an explosion blamed on Kurdish militants, and a female suicide bomber tried to assassinate a former government minister.
The soldiers died when a roadside bomb blew up their armoured vehicle near the town of Lice, in the mainly Kurdish south-east.
They had been scouring the area ahead of a large military convoy when the device went off. The army chief of staff, General Ilker Basbug, said the bomb was home-made and had been detonated by remote control or cable.
Basbug did not blame any group, but the attack was widely assumed to have been carried out by the PKK, which is classified by Turkey, the US and the EU as a terrorist organisation.
It was the deadliest assault by Kurdish rebels since last October, when 17 soldiers were killed in an attack on a military outpost near the Iraqi border.
Poster Comment:
One of the consequences of the Iraq war was heightened tensions between the Kurds and Turks, including bombing attacks and such. The Turks can thank us for their new troubles with the Kurds. For every action, there is a reaction.