by Our Foreign Desk

US CIVIL rights campaigners have identified a group which influenced the Charleston church shooter as white supremacist and anti-desegregation.

A manifesto attributed to suspect Dylann Roof, who is under arrest for last week’s massacre, said that he read about “brutal black on white murders” on the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).

Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s Intelligence Project, warned on Monday that the CCC was spreading dangerous propaganda.

“Sometimes the fragile-minded read this stuff, believe this stuff and act on it and that’s what the tragedy is here,” she said.

The centre’s website describes the CCC as a “crudely white-supremacist group.”

In 1999, Republican national committee chairman Jim Nicholson called on fellow party members to leave the CCC because “it appears that this group does hold racist views.”

CCC spokesman Jared Taylor claimed on Monday that “no-one in the organisation that I know of … has ever heard of (Mr Roof).

“He certainly was never a member and I don’t suspect that he ever attended a meeting,” Mr Taylor added.

“Our site educated him. Our site told him the truth about interracial crime.

“What he then decided to do with that truth is absolutely not our responsibility,” said Mr Taylor, who insisted that he “categorically condemns” the killings.

CCC president Earl Holt has contributed more than $60,000 (£38,000) to the Republican Party, including presidential candidates, since 2010.

Several of the recipients have said that they would return those donations or give the money to charity.

In 1989, Mr Holt was elected to the St Louis, Missouri, school board as part of a faction which opposed racial integration or “busing.”

In a statement posted online on Sunday, Mr Holt said that it “was not surprising” that Mr Roof had referred to the CCC, but claimed that it was “hardly responsible for the actions of this deranged individual merely because he gleaned accurate information from our website.”

• South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said on Monday that the Confederate flag should be removed from the grounds of the state legislature building.
• At the same time, superstore chain Wal-Mart announced that it was removing all items featuring the Confederate flag from its shelves and website.