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Chronicle Reporter
A RACIST white supremacist who posed for Facebook pictures wearing a jacket decorated with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was arrested in the United States yesterday after walking into a black church and shooting dead nine people. Dylann Storm Roof, 21, was caught some 200 miles away in North Carolina, after the massacre in Charleston.

After an intensive, 14-hour manhunt, Roof, who carried out a massacre that officials are calling racially motivated, was arrested in Shelby during a traffic stop, said Greg Mullen, the Charleston police chief.

Police say Roof, who is white, walked into the prayer meeting on Wednesday night, sat down with black parishioners for nearly an hour, and then opened fire.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, the FBI, and the United States Attorney’s Office for South Carolina have opened a hate crime investigation into the shooting, which left six women and three men dead, and Chief Mullen has called it a hate crime.

US President Barack Obama, speaking at the White House, said: “To say that our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families and their community doesn’t say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel.”

Obama said he had known the pastor who was killed, as well as other church members. He called the shooting “particularly heartbreaking” because it occurred in a place of worship where African-Americans worked to end slavery.

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.

David A Thomas, the special agent in charge of FBI’s bureau in Columbia, said Roof, who is from the Columbia, South Carolina, had not been someone who was being watched by the agency.