America
Charleston church shooter charged with murder
Washington, June 19
The man arrested after
fatally shooting nine people at an African-American church in
Charleston, South Carolina, was charged on Friday with nine counts of
murder, police said.
Dylann Roof, 21, also faces a weapons possession charge and is expected to appear in court later on Friday for a bail hearing.
Apprehended
on Thursday in the neighbouring state of North Carolina, Roof has
confessed to police, US media outlets reported, citing law enforcement
officials.
The shooting occurred around 9 p.m. on Wednesday, an
hour after the suspect entered Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church during Bible study.
The suspect killed all but three of the 12 other people who were in the church with him at the time of the attack.
Among
the three men and six women slain was the church's senior pastor, state
Senator Clementa Pinckney, while one of the survivors said that the
shooter told her he was sparing her life so she could "tell everybody
what happened".
The Rev. Pinckney's cousin, Sylvia Johnson, told
NBC News that one survivor reported the shooter as saying: "I have to do
it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have
to go."
Roof's friends and acquaintances have reached out to the
media to say that while he spoke of wanting to start a race war and the
need to re-institute racial segregation, they never thought he would
resort to violence.
One of the photos on Roof's Facebook page
shows him wearing a jacket with patches representing the flags of
apartheid South Africa and the former Rhodesia, ruled by a white
minority government until the territory formally became independent from
Britain in 1980 as Zimbabwe.
A source familiar with the
investigation told NBC News that Roof said during questioning that the
friendly reception he got from the group at Emanuel made him reconsider
his plan.
Roof "almost didn't go through with it because everyone
was so nice to him," but finally decided to "go through with his
mission," the source said.
Emanuel AME, founded in 1816, has played a historic role in the life of Charleston's black community.
While
the massacre has been labelled a hate crime by Charleston's mayor and
police chief and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, the state does not
have a hate crimes statute.
US Attorney General Loretta Lynch
announced on Thursday that the FBI and Justice Department had opened an
investigation with an eye to charging Roof under the federal hate crimes
law.
"This is an absolute hate crime," the Republican governor
said on NBC's "Today" show. "We've been talking with the investigators
because we've been going through the interviews, they said they looked
pure evil in the eye."
At the same time, Haley said she wants Roof to be tried on the state murder charges.
"We
will absolutely want him to have the death penalty. This is the worst
hate that I've seen and the country has seen in a long time," she said.
South Carolina's most recent execution was in 2011.