Charleston church shooting $88m settlement reached

The US justice department says it will pay $88m (£64m) to the victims of a white supremacist, who shot dead nine black worshippers in a South Carolina church in 2015.

The settlement resolves a lawsuit that accused the FBI of a faulty background check system which allowed Dylann Roof to buy the gun used in the shooting.

The victims’ families will each get between $6m and $7.5m, and five injured survivors will receive $5m each.

Roof is facing the death penalty.

The shooting happened inside the Mother Emanuel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in the city of Charleston on 17 June 2015.

Roof, a self-proclaimed white supremacist who is now aged 27, carried out the attack to spark a “race war”, according to prosecutors.

“Since the day of the shooting, the Justice Department has sought to bring justice to the community, first by a successful hate crime prosecution and today by settling civil claims,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.

Meanwhile, Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said: “The department hopes that these settlements, combined with its prosecution of the shooter will bring some modicum of justice to the victims of this heinous act of hate.”

The shooting sent shockwaves across the US.

President Barack Obama, who was in office at the time, sung Amazing Grace at the funeral of the church’s pastor Clementa Pinckney, who was one of the victims.

Dylann Roof appealed his death row conviction last year, saying he was suffering with various mental illnesses when he represented himself at trial. But in August this year, an appeals court upheld the penalty, and Roof remains on death row in Indiana.