Booking photo of Dylann Storm Roof, April 26

WASHINGTON — The FBI has identified the gunman in the shooting that killed nine people at a Charleston, South Carolina, church as 21-year-old Dylann Roof.

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,” Carson Cowles, 56, told Reuters in a phone interview.

Law enforcement agents were present at Roof’s home, Cowles said, adding he believed the shooter’s father had recently bought him a .45-caliber handgun as a birthday present.

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

The U.S. Department of Justice opened a hate crime investigation into the shooting, which follows a string of racially charged killings that have prompted waves of protest across the United States over the past year and sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

Roof sat with churchgoers inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church for about an hour on Wednesday before opening fire, Police Chief Gregory Mullen said.

He reloaded five times even as victims pleaded with him to stop, a relative of Pinckney’s said. Sylvia Johnson, a cousin, told MSNBC that a survivor 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.

Demonstrations have rocked New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, Missouri and other cities following police killings of unarmed black men including Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and Michael Brown.

A white police officer was charged with murder after he shot an unarmed black man in April in neighboring North Charleston.

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