Q+A-Who carried out deadly attack on Turkish wedding?

May 5 (Reuters) - Gunmen armed with automatic weapons and grenades attacked a wedding party in southeastern Turkey on Monday, killing at least 45 people.

The acting governor of the province of Mardin, Ahmet Ferhat Ozen, told Reuters by telephone the assailants, wearing masks, stormed a building in Bilge village near Sultankoy, some 20 km (12 miles) from Mardin, and opened fire on wedding guests.

Local media said the families of the bride and the groom included members of state-sponsored village guards.



WHO ARE THE VILLAGE GUARDS?

The guards stem from a controversial policy established in 1985 to set up a paramilitary force to protect villages against attacks by Kurdish rebels, patrol the rugged mountains and help fight the separatists.

But their right to carry arms, to inform on suspected separatist activities and to kill in the name of the state has made them a force within the region, while critics say they use their status to settle family scores and take over land.

Many of their kin view them as traitors. They number up to 60,000.



WHO WAS BEHIND THE ATTACK?

Interior Minister Besir Atalay said initial evidence did not point to terrorism, suggesting he was ruling out involvement of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Television broadcasters said there had been a blood feud in the village in recent years. Such feuds between families are not uncommon in the region.

The PKK took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 with the aim of creating an ethnic Kurdish homeland in the southeast. Some 40,000 people have been killed in conflict.

Much of the southeast is divided into pro and anti-PKK supporters, although the majority of the region has sympathy for the cause behind the PKK rebels.

Kurds in the southeast complain of cultural and political discrimination by the Turkish state, which has in recent years improved rights as it seeks to join the European Union.

The government is currently working on a project to bring investment to the impoverished southeast.

The PKK has been significantly weakened over the past two years by a military offensive inside Turkey and across in northern Iraq. The military suffered a setback last month when the PKK attacked a military convoy, killing nine soldiers.



HOW WIDESPREAD ARE BLOOD FEUDS?

Blood feuds are often started in southeast Turkey as a result of squabbles over property or marriages. Some of them are resolved through peaceful means, though they can often erupt into sudden violence when feuding clans meet.

Local rivalry spilling into deadly feuds are not unheard of in southeast Turkey, although it is rare for the death toll to be as high as in this attack.

Squabbles over property or marriages in religiously conservative and predominantly Kurdish southeastern Turkey are the main cause for blood feuds. The area has been stricken by poverty and violence for decades.

Families in the region are often defined by loyalties either to the PKK and to security forces. Village guards in the past have been accused of using their status to carry out attacks on rival clans, sometimes PKK sympathisers, while PKK supporters are frequently suspected of carrying out attacks on village guards and their families.



WILL ATTACK LEAD TO ESCALATION IN VIOLENCE?

If the attack is as media say linked to a blood feud it poses little danger to broader security in the region. However, if the attack was carried out by the PKK, even though Atalay suggested they appeared not to be involved, it may lead to increased military operations against suspected PKK positions and detention of politicians suspected of links to the PKK.

Tensions are already running high in the southeast after police detained scores of Democratic Society Party (DTP) members and activists in raids across Turkey that authorities said were aimed at isolating the PKK.

Deputies and mayors of the DTP, Turkey's main Kurdish party represented in parliament, started a hunger strike on Sunday to protest at the detention of party members accused of links to the separatist Kurdish rebel group PKK.

The DTP says the arrests were revenge for the party's success in the southeast in last month's local elections, in which it beat the ruling party AKP despite government overtures to Kurds. (Reporting by Thomas Grove; Editing by Charles Dick)