Policeman's sleeping family killed in north Iraq

KIRKUK, Iraq (Reuters) - Gunmen stormed the house of a Kurdish policeman on Sunday and shot dead his wife and three children while they slept, Iraqi police said, an attack possibly aimed at inciting violence between Arabs and Kurds.

The attack took place in a Kurdish neighborhood of the disputed northern city of Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, which Iraqi Kurds claim as their ancestral capital and want to annex to their largely autonomous region, something the oil-producing city's Arab residents reject.

"He came back to his home this morning and found his children and their mother shot in the head while they were asleep," a police official said, asking not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Police and soldiers are a main target of Sunni Islamist insurgents like al Qaeda and other groups trying to undermine Iraq's government and reignite the sectarian slaughter that brought the country to the brink of civil war in 2006/07.

"We will hunt down the perpetrators of this crime and we will present them to justice," said local police Brigadier-General Sarhat Qader.

War between majority Shi'ite Muslims and Sunni Arabs, who were dominant under Saddam Hussein, has abated, but a spate of bombings since U.S. troops pulled out of Iraqi cities in June has cast a cloud over the security gains of the past 18 months.

Five off-duty Iraqi soldiers were killed on Saturday near the city of Baiji, 180 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, when gunmen fired on their car in a drive-by shooting.

U.S. officials are most worried that tensions between Arabs and ethnic Kurds over land, oil and power could trigger Iraq's next major conflict. They say al Qaeda and other groups are exploiting those tensions to stage attacks in the north.

Police in Kirkuk issued photographs of the Kurdish policeman's dead wife and children, aged from one to 3-1/2 years, lying in a bed together. It was not clear if they had been killed in the bed.

(Reporting by Mustafa Mahmoud; Additional reporting Aseel Kami in Baghdad; Writing by Michael Christie; Editing by Tim Cocks and Elizabeth Fullerton)