Charleston church shooting suspect is nabbed

The gunman wanted in the killing of nine people at a prayer meeting at a historic black church in this city’s downtown area was taken into custody Thursday morning in North Carolina.

Charleston’s police chief, Greg Mullen, said that the suspect, Dylann Storm, Roof, 21, was caught about 200 miles away, in Shelby, N.C., a town east of Charlotte. The police here have said Roof, of the Columbia area, is the white gunman who walked into a prayer meeting, sat down with black parishioners for nearly an hour, and then opened fire — a burst of violence that officials described as racially motivated.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the F.B.I., and the United States Attorney’s Office for South Carolina opened a hate crime investigation into the shooting, parallel to the state and local investigation, a department official said. Chief Mullen called the shooting, which left six women and three men dead, a hate crime.

Roof’s Facebook profile picture shows him wearing a jacket decorated with the flags of two former white supremacist regimes, in apartheid-era South Africa and in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. The gunman walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Churchafter 8 p.m., and the first call to police came shortly after 9 p.m. Among the dead was the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, pastor of the church, who was also a state senator.

Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Mr. Pinckney, told NBC News that she had spoken with a survivor of the shooting who told her the gunman reloaded five times. The survivor, she said, told her that the gunman had entered the church and asked for the pastor.

Then he sat next to Mr. Pinckney during the Bible study before opening fire. “I have to do it,” the gunman was quoted as saying. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go The police released pictures from surveillance footage of the man who is believed to be the gunman, and the police said he had been seen leaving the church in a black, four-door sedan that was also captured on video.