The Mardin engagement ceremony massacre was a massacre carried out by Mehmet Çelebi, a village guard of Kurdish origin, at an engagement ceremony where at least forty-four people were killed on May 4, 2009, in the village of Bilge in the Mazıdağı district of south-eastern Mardin Province in Turkey. The attack was perpetrated using grenades and automatic weapons by at least two masked assailants, who authorities believe are involved in a feud between two families. According to some sources, it was an internal feud of the Kurdish Çelebi clan. The faces of the victims were left in a physically unrecognisable state. Reuters said it was "one of the worst attacks involving civilians in Turkey's modern history", declaring that the scale of the attack had shocked the nation. Casualties The guests were escorted into a large room before being attacked with hand grenades. The attack killed at least forty-four people and injured six, according to Turkey's Interior Minister, Beşir Atalay. The Bilge village head along with ten other members of his family were among those killed in the attack. Six of the dead were children, sixteen were reported as being women, and twenty-two as men. Other corpses discovered at the scene included those of the bride, Sevgi Çelebi, and her husband, Habib Ari alongside Ari's sister, Ruken, a four-year-old girl. The bride's father, Cemil Çelebi, was injured. The wedding cleric himself was also killed in the incident. Two girls allegedly survived by hiding under the corpses of associates. One whole family, composed of two adult parents and six children between the ages of three and twelve at the time of their deaths, were slaughtered. Several wailing women pursued the ambulances bearing 17 corpses to a Mardin morgue. One man whose nephew was murdered described the scene as "horrifying", saying "you could not believe your eyes". Another involved man claimed the slaughter began "after they took their position to perform prayers" and that explosives had been used to dismember the faces of the victims. Schoolteacher Sadik Akbulut attended the engagement ceremony alongside his wife, Bedia Akbulut, but survived after he failed to wake up in time for the party. Bedia claimed they heard shots being fired and that her husband dimmed the lights. Approximately two hundred guests attended the engagement ceremony. Allegations of a family feud surfaced when it emerged that there was a similarity between the dead and those who left