Gunmen in uniform slaughter Iraqi family of six

Gunmen wearing army uniforms stormed a house on Wednesday and killed six members of the same family, including two women and a teenage girl, in a conservative rural area of Iraq, police said. The women had their throats cut while the men were shot in the head in the attack in Tarmiya, 25 km (15 miles) north of Baghdad, which until recently was viewed as a stronghold of Sunni Islamist al Qaeda, police said. The motives for the killings were not immediately clear. Overall violence in Iraq has fallen sharply in the past 18 months as sectarian war has subsided between once dominant Sunnis and the country's majority Shi'ites, propelled into power after the fall of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.