BAGHDAD, Aug 2 (AFP) - Iraqi leaders appealed for unity Monday after a series of church bombings marked the first coordinated assault on Christians, which clerics denounced as a crude attempt to stir up religious hatred.
Meanwhile, an embassy official in Baghdad said that a Turkish hostage had been killed amid a wave of abductions of foreigners.
The victim's employer, Bilintur, which specializes in catering, confirmed from Ankara that one of their staff, Murat Yuce, had been killed.
At least 10 people were killed and some 50 wounded when six bombs blew up outside four churches in Baghdad and one in Mosul as Christians celebrated evening mass Sunday.
It was an unprecedented assault on the country's 700,000 Christians, who have traditionally lived in peace with the overwhelming Muslim majority.
As survivors counted the cost of the destruction, many Baghdadi Christians pointed the finger at foreigners for masterminding the murderous attacks.
"This was not done by Iraqis. It was done by people who don't know who God is," said Marie Butros, 35, a hospital secretary in the city's upscale Karada district which was targeted by two of the bombs.
"Our borders are open and a lot of foreigners can enter," she said.
So far no group has claimed responsibility for the strikes. In the past, Washington has repeatedly blamed alleged Al-Qaeda chief in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, for some of the country's bloodiest bombings.
Naming no names, Iraq's largely ceremonial president, Ghazi al-Yawar, condemned the attacks as "terrorist explosions" and called for unity.
"We call upon our people to stand shoulder to shoulder against those who kill our brothers, sons and destroy our homes and places of worship," he said.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most revered Shiite Muslim spiritual leader, also reached across the confessional divide to denounce a "criminal campaign targeting Iraq's unity, stability and independence".
"We denounce and condemn those terrible crimes... We should all be working together as a government and a people in order to put an end to the attacks against Iraqis," said a statement from his office in the holy city of Najaf.
A spokesman for radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, who waged a deadly revolt against US-led occupation forces earlier this year, also condemned the attacks as a calculated "terrorist" attempt to stir up inter-communal strife.
"We strongly denounce these criminal acts aimed at nothing but creating strife among the united people of Iraq," said Ahmed al-Shabani.
"The committee observes the fingerprint of foreign groups who want to split the people or Iraq and want to sow chaos," said the influential Committee of Muslim Scholars.
Emmanuel Delly, the patriarch of the Chaldean church, the largest Christian denomination in Iraq, begged for a united front in the face of violence.
"Christians and Muslims must stand together for the good of Iraq because we are one family," he told AFP -- an appeal he was to address to the caretaker Iraqi government.
Streets outside four churches in Baghdad were reduced to something akin to a war zone when car bombs blew up within minutes of each other.
Two struck Karada, a third outside the St Peter and St Paul church and seminary complex in al-Dura, reducing the area to a war zone, and a fourth detonated outside a Chaldean Catholic church in the east of the city.
The US military said a fifth device, packed with mortars rounds, was defused outside another church in Baghdad.
"It's a crime. It's Sunday, we were at mass. There were a lot of women and children," said Bishop Raphael Kutami at the Syriac church in Baghdad.
In Mosul, two car bombs exploded in the early evening outside a Syrian-rite church, killing one and wounding 15.
Poverty and war induced many Christians to start leaving Iraq from the early 1980s. Nearly half a million have departed in the last 15 years.