Charleston police have confirmed that nine people were killed in an attack on one of the southern city’s historic black churches that will prompt another reassessment of race relations in the US.
Police, speaking for the first times after the shooting occurred, said that the suspect in the shootings, described as a 21-year-old white male, was still at large. Officials described the attack as a “hate crime”.
The scale of the tragedy will only further inflame racial tensions in a city — and in a nation — that has only recently seen a flare-up of anger over the killing of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, by North Charleston police. It also comes at time when the US been racked by divisions between black men and its police force.