At least 52 people were killed in religious rioting sparked by three suicide bombings of churches that occurred on Sunday, hospital staff said Monday, Reuters reports.

Suicide bombers killed 21 people in attacks on three churches in Nigeria during Sunday services, exacerbating religious tensions in a West African nation that is almost evenly divided between Muslims and Christians.

Authorities arrested one of the bombers who survived, said Kaduna State police chief Mohammed Abubakar Jinjiri, but he declined to say who police suspect was responsible for the bombings.

It was the third Sunday in a row that deadly attacks have been carried out against Christian churches in northern Nigeria. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the latest one, but suspicion fell on the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram because it took responsibility for the two earlier weekend assaults.

Boko Haram is waging an increasingly bloody fight with security agencies and the public in Nigeria. More than 560 people have been killed in violence blamed on the sect this year alone, according to an Associated Press count.

On Sunday, the suicide bombers drove explosive-laden cars to the gates of two churches in different parts of the city of Zaria and detonated them within minutes of each other. A similar attack targeted a church in the city of Kaduna about half an hour later at about 9:25 a.m., police said, prompting reprisals by Christian youths.

The attacks in the northern state of Kaduna killed a total of 21 people and wounded at least 100, said an official who works with a relief agency involved in rescue efforts. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to journalists.

It wasn't immediately known if the reprisal attacks caused casualties in the religious flashpoint state, but hundreds of people have died in previous retaliatory violence there.

"The Boko Haram group's intention in bombing the churches is to attract reprisal attacks from the Christians, draw the battle line between Muslim and Christians and, (by doing so) get moderate Muslims to support them," said Shehu Sani, the president of the Kaduna-based Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria.

In Italy, the Vatican decried what it called systematic attacks against Christian churches in Nigeria. Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement that the "systematicness" of the attacks against Christian places of worship on a Sunday is "horrible and unacceptable" and reflects "an absurd design of hatred."

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