Dozens of photographs that appear to show Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting suspect Dylann Roof holding a Confederate flag and burning an American flag surfaced Saturday, along with racist writings on an extremist website.
The 60 pictures include Roof holding the Confederate flag and a close-up of him with a .45-caliber pistol in hand. He is accused of using a similar handgun in the church shooting. It was not clear who posted the photographs or when.
One photograph shows Roof wearing a black jacket with flags from apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, which includes the region now known as Zimbabwe — considered some of the most oppressive governments of modern times.
Roof also is seen posing with wax reproductions of slaves in other photographs, holding a 19th-century-era Confederate flag from Southern states where slavery was practiced, standing at the site of a slave plantation and pointing a handgun at the camera.
The Associated Press reported that the FBI was investigating the site, which was taken offline Saturday shortly after it was discovered.
A purported manifesto was also discovered on the Internet. It’s unclear whether he wrote it, but the white supremacist screed is similar to what Roof has told friends and what he said before allegedly opening fire in the black Emanuel AME Church on Wednesday night.
The nearly 2,500-word essay starts with Roof saying he was not raised in a racist home. He said the Trayvon Martin killing sparked his interest in “black-on-white crime” and led him to read about it on the Internet.
He said he chose Charleston because at one time it had the highest ratio of blacks to whites and because white supremacist groups were not doing enough.
A section of the manifesto titled “an explanation” read: “I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight.”
“We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet,” it continued. “Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
The text was referring to the right-wing, extremist Ku Klux Klan organization.
U.S. media became aware of the online manifesto Saturday, although it appears to have existed before the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church stunned the nation.
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