The court found the suspects guilty on 44 counts of premedidated murder over the May 4 carnage at the village of Bilge in Mardin province with no chance of parole, the report said.

An underage suspect was given a 15-year prison sentence for each of the 44 victims killed.

The court also sentenced another suspect, who was not believed to be among the gunmen but was found to be in possession of weapons during the investigation, to 15 years in prison.

A further suspect was given a six-month prison sentence for firing in a public space while four others were acquitted, the agency said.

A lawyer for the defendants said they would appeal against the verdict.

The case was heard behind closed doors in the northern city of Corum for security reasons.

In the attack, which shocked the country, masked gunmen stormed into Bilge, a small Kurdish village near the Syrian border, and opened fire just after a Muslim preacher had completed the wedding ceremony.

It was claimed at the time that the carnage was motivated by long-running hostilities between rival families.

The indictment said there was no evidence to support the claim, but also offered no motive for the crime.

In a newspaper interview last year, the son of the chief suspect had said that his father ordered the attack after discovering that his wife was conducting an affair with a neighbour.

The settling of disputes through violence is frequent in Turkey's Kurdish-populated regions, where feudal traditions persist.

Most of the assailants were members of the "village guard" -- a Kurdish militia force recruited by the government to help fight separatist Kurdish rebels -- who used government-supplied arms in the attack.

The bloodbath stoked calls for disbanding the militia, whose members have often been implicated in crimes such as murder, rape and drug smuggling, even though they have proved useful helpers of the army against the rebels.