Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old suspect in the recent shooting in a Charleston, S.C. church, where nine black people were killed, admitted the crime, saying he had hoped to start a "race war," CNN reported.
Roof will face a bail hearing on Friday, video a video link-up from a Charleston-area detention center, where he was brought by police after his arrest in North Carolina, 220 miles north of the nearly 200-year-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Roof's tirades against African Americans "taking over the world" and his desire to ignite "a civil war" urged him to go on the shooting spree, which he planned for around six months, his roommate Dalton Tyler revealed, reported the Guardian.
"He was big into segregation and other stuff," Tyler told ABC News. "He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself."
According to the Daily Beast, a Facebook page which is now taken down, showed an image of Roof wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which fought a bitter civil war against black majority rule. The image apparently showcased his belief in white supremacy.
U.S. officials are investigating the alleged hate crime. The incident follows the current controversy where the police killed several unarmed black men that provoked angry national debates about race relations, policing and the criminal justice system.
