The bride and groom, six children and 16 other women, three of them pregnant, were among the victims of the worst blood feud massacre in Turkey. Eight men from the village in the southeastern province of Mardin were detained but the barbarity of the killings sent shockwaves across Turkey.

Relatives began burying the dead within hours of the shootout. About 200 people gathered at the entrance to Bilge to mourn as mechanical diggers lined up rows of graves and ambulances brought in more bodies after forensic examinations.

Four masked men burst into the village square from different directions late Monday, just after a Muslim preacher had completed the wedding ceremony, and opened fire on the crowd, witnesses told AFP.

The gunmen then stormed several houses, continuing to shoot, they said.

The bride, the groom, his parents and four-year-old sister as well as the village imam were all killed, authorities and witnesses said.

One survivor said the attackers herded women and children into a room and sprayed them with bullets, a local official, relaying her account, said.

The assailants escaped in the dark as a sandstorm cut visibility in the area, which is near the Syrian border.

Troops sealed off Bilge and police arrested eight suspects -- all hailing from the village and related to some of the victims, Interior Minister Besir Atalay said.

The motive behind the massacre remained unclear. But critics slammed easy the access to weapons in the region, blamed on a government policy of arming Kurdish villagers to back the army against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a separatist campaign in the southeast since 1984.

"Even the PKK would not have done this," said Ahmet, who lost relatives in the shooting.

"It is the bloodiest incident related to a blood feud that I know of," said Mazhar Bagli, an academic in nearby Diyarbakir, who has researched the clan rivalry in the region.

Sait Sanli, a leading activist acting as a mediator in settling feuds, agreed it was the worst.

Blood feuds are frequent in Turkey's Kurdish-populated regions, where medieval traditions persist, illiteracy is high and many see the gun as a legitimate tool to settle scores.

Hostilities are triggered by land disputes, unpaid debts, abductions or girls eloping with someone from a rival clan.

"Pointing guns at children, slaying defenceless and innocent people is inhumane... it's beyond words," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in Ankara.

President Abdullah Gul branded the shooting "primitivity... and cruelty that is impossible to explain".

In Bilge, residents suggested different possible motives for the massacre, ranging from economic interests to marriage disputes.

One villager, Cemil Gur, spoke of an argument over land turned into trout farms. "There had been strife for the past two years over the rent to be obtained from the farms... We never thought it would get to this stage," he told AFP.

Other villagers said the attackers had a feud going back some 20 years with the groom's family and had objected to the marriage.

"The attackers wanted the girl to marry one of their own relatives. We learned there was an argument recently between the family of the assailants and that of the bride," Anatolia news agency quoted an unnamed villager as saying.

Kurdish politicians blamed the bloodshed on the "village guard" system, under which the government has armed some 58,000 Kurds to help in the fight against the PKK.

Many men in Bilge were members of the village guard, including the suspected attackers, locals said.

Critics have long urged the abolition of the militia, arguing that it has stoked the crime rate in the restive region, where the PKK insurgency has claimed about 45,000 lives.

Official statistics show that hundreds of village guards have been linked to murders, kidnapping, drug-trafficking and rapes.