By Harriet McLeod

CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) – Police in Charleston, South Carolina, were searching on Thursday for a white gunman who killed nine people in a historic African-American church including the pastor, a black state senator, in an attack the U.S. Department of Justice called a hate crime.

The FBI identified the shooter as Dylann Roof of Columbia, South Carolina. An uncle of Roof’s said he recognized the man in the surveillance photo as his nephew.

“The more I look at him, the more I’m convinced, that’s him,” said Carson Cowles, 56, in a phone interview.

Roof, a 21-year-old white man with sandy blond hair, sat with churchgoers inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church for about an hour on Wednesday before opening fire, Police Chief Gregory Mullen said.

Eight victims were found dead in the church, Mullen told reporters, and a ninth person died after being taken to hospital. One other person was wounded and was being treated at a local hospital, Mullen said, adding that there were other survivors.

The victims included Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was the church’s pastor and a Democratic member of the state Senate, according to colleagues.

A cousin of Pinckney’s, Sylvia Johnson, told MSNBC that a survivor of the shooting told her the gunman reloaded five times during the attack. Pinckney tried to talk him out of it, she said.

“He just said, ‘I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country,” Johnson said.

The Charleston church is one of the largest and oldest black congregations in the South, its website says. It has its roots in the early 19th century, and was founded in part by a freed slave who was later executed for organizing a revolt, according to the U.S. National Park Service.

The attack follows the April shooting of an unarmed black man in neighboring North Charleston by a white police officer. The officer has been charged with murder in that case, one of a number of deaths of unarmed black men in encounters with police that have raised racial tensions in the United States.

The community reacted with shock and grief after Wednesday’s shooting.

“I’m heartbroken,” said Shona Holmes, 28, a bystander at the aftermath of the shooting. “It’s just hurtful to think that someone would come in and shoot people in a church. If you’re not safe in church, where are you safe?”

Roof is extremely dangerous, Mullen said, and police did not have a sense of where he might be.

(Additional reporting by Emily Flitter in New York, Letitia Stein in Tampa, Florida, Randall Hill in Charleston, S.C., Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Bernadette Baum and James Dalgleish)