Pictured:21year old Dylann Roof has been arrested 'for shooting nine people dead at South Carolina church bible study'

Dylann Storm Roof, the man who allegedly entered a South Carolina church last night and massacred nine people at their weekly bible study meeting, has been escorted in prison stripes onto a plane to be extradited from North Carolina.

The 21-year-old was arrested shortly before noon on Thursday in Shelby, NC, 250 miles north of the targeted church in Charleston, SC.

At 6.20pm Eastern Time he was seen in a jumpsuit, chains and a bullet-proof vest being chaperoned by dozens of armed police officers onto an airplane bound for South Carolina. 

 

He was detained after a member of the public spotted his car and called the cops, Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said. Roof, from Columbia, was in his vehicle and armed when he was approached by an officer but he was cooperative and taken into custody. He has waived extradition in North Carolina and has been cleared to return to South Carolina.

 

'In America, we don't let bad people like this get away,' said Charleston Mayor, Joseph P. Riley, Jr. at a press conference announcing the arrest.

On Wednesday, Roof allegedly entered the church and joined the bible study group for as long as an hour before suddenly opening fire on the group.

One survivor recounted how he reloaded his gun five times as he picked off his victims - killing three females and six males, including the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who is also a South Carolina state senator. 

Pinckney's cousin told NBC News that one of the survivors told her they had urged Roof to stop.

'He just said: "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go",' Sylvia Johnson said.

Roof spared one woman so she could 'tell the world what happened', eye witnesses recounted, while a five-year-old girl also survived the attack after her grandmother told her to play dead. The gunman then fled.

Police launched a massive manhunt for Roof and released surveillance images showing him and his car, warning the public that he was dangerous. He was eventually caught on Thursday morning.

His roommate also told ABC News that Roof had been 'planning something like that for six months'.

'He was big into segregation and other stuff,' the roommate, Dalton Tyler, said. 'He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.'

As the search was underway, Roof's uncle, Carson Cowles, also revealed that his 'quiet, soft spoken' nephew had received a .45 caliber pistol as a birthday present in April. Tyler, the roommate, told ABC that Roof's parents had not allowed him to take the new weapon with him until last week.

Despite the roommate's claims about his plot, Cowles said the family was shocked by the killings. 

'Nobody in my family had seen anything like this coming,' Cowles said. 'I said, if it is him, and when they catch him, he's got to pay for this.'  

He said he had told his sister, Roof's mother, several years ago that Roof was too introverted and worried he was cooped up in his room too much. 

'I said he was like 19 years old, he still didn't have a job, a driver's license or anything like that and he just stayed in his room a lot of the time,' Cowles said.

A high school classmate of Roof's, John Mullins, told The Daily Beast that the accused white supremacist killer was 'kind of wild' and a big time prescription drug abuser.

'He used drugs heavily a lot,' Mullins said. 'It obviously harder than marijuana. He was like a pill popper, from what I understood. Like Xanax, and stuff like that.'

Court records reveal that a February drug charge cited Roof's possession of methamphetamine, cocaine and LSD, RadarOnline reports.

The February arrest was prompted when employees at the Columbiana Centre mall told authorities Roof was 'out-of-the-ordinary questions' that made them uneasy, the New York Times reports.

In a photograph of Roof on Facebook, he is seen glaring at the camera while displaying the flag of apartheid-era South Africa on his jacket. He is also wearing another flag depicting that of white-rule Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe.

Roof attended ninth grade at White Knoll High during the 2008-09 school year and went there for the first half of the following academic year, district spokeswoman Mary Beth Hill said. The school system gave no reason for Roof's departure and said it had no record of him attending any other schools in the district.

According to CBS News, school records show that between fourth and ninth grade, Roof attended six different schools, and repeated the ninth grade. 

Court records show he was charged with a drugs offense in March 2015 and trespassing in April. 

Of the shooting, Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said: 'We believe this is a hate crime - that is how we are investigating it.'

On Thursday, the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office have launched a hate crime investigation into the mass shooting, ABC reported. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other agencies have joined the investigation, Mullen said. 

The killer is believed to have entered the church around 8pm before taking part in the prayer group for about an hour, police said. 

Although it is a black church, it would not be surprising to see a white person - or a person of any other race - attending a gathering there, Charleston's NAACP President Dot Scott told CNN on Thursday.

Speaking in the NBC interview, Pinckney's cousin said Roof had specifically asked for the reverend before sitting beside him throughout the meeting.

The Reverend Norvel Goff, a presiding elder for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, told the Washington Post that the suspect 'walked in, from my understanding, not so much as a participant, but as a brief observer who then stood up and then started shooting'.

Police received the first call about the shooting shortly after 9pm. 

Emergency responders found eight people dead inside the church, and one was taken to hospital where they later died, Mullen said on Thursday. Among the dead was Reverend and State Senator Pinckney. On Thursday, photos showed a black cloth placed over Pinckney's seat in the South Carolina Senate.

The eight other victims, aged between 26 and 87, were named by the coroner on Thursday.

They were identified as Tywanza Sanders, 26, Sharonda Singleton, 45, DePayne Middleton, 49, Cynthia Hurd, 54, Myra Thompson, 59, Ethel Lee Lance, 70, Daniel Simmons, 76, and Susie Jackson, 87. 

Police said that three survivors were also found inside the church.

Dot Scott of the NAACP told the Post and Courier that a female survivor told her family members that the gunman said she could escape. He said he was letting her live so she could tell the world what happened.

Meanwhile, family members who were being briefed by chaplains after the shooting reportedly said that a five-year-old girl survived the attack after she was told to play dead by her grandmother. 

'The tragedy that we're addressing right now is indescribable,' Mullen said on Thursday morning. 'No one in this community will ever forget this night.

'We are committed to do whatever is necessary to bring this individual to justice. We are not leaving any stone unturned.' 

Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr added: 'This is an unfathomable and unspeakable act by somebody filled with hate and with a deranged mind.

'We're going to put our arms around this church... We're going to find this horrible scoundrel.' 

And speaking from the White House on Thursday afternoon, President Obama called the murders 'senseless'.

'Any death of this sort is a tragedy, any shooting involving multiple victims is a tragedy,' he said. 'There is something particularly heartbreaking about death happening somewhere we seek solace and we seek peace.

'Methodist Emanuel is in fact more than a church, this is a place of worship that was founded by African Americans seeking liberty. This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America.'

He went on: 'The fact that this took place in a black church also raises questions about a dark part of our history.' 

He also spoke out about how the incident again signals the need for stricter gun control.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of the victims, God knows best. In all things never forget to give God thanks...