Washington, Apr 8 (EFE).- A U.S. police officer has been charged with murder after killing an unarmed black man in North Charleston in South Carolina, said the city's mayor.
The circumstances of Saturday's shooting came to light Tuesday when a video recorded by a witness emerged to show the officer firing repeatedly at the victim as he runs away.
White police officer Michael Slager, 33, stopped Walter Scott, 50, for driving a vehicle with a broken light.
Scott appears to be running away when Slager fires a barrage of shots killing him.
The video, given to The New York Times daily by Scott's lawyer, shows the officer ordering the victim to place his hands behind his back as he lies motionless on the ground after being shot.
"When you're wrong, you're wrong. When you make a bad decision, don't care if you're behind the shield or a citizen on the street, you have to live with that decision," North Charleston mayor Keith Summey told reporters.
He added that the police officer will be charged with murder.
Slater had claimed on Saturday that he shot Scott because he feared for his life after Scott tried to wrench a stun gun away from him.
This is the latest in a series of deaths in which white police officers have killed unarmed black suspects in questionable circumstances.
The issue first erupted after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot dead by a white police officer in August.
It is now subject to investigation by the U.S. Justice Department under Eric Holder, the nation's first African-American attorney general.
U.S. President Barack Obama recently acknowledged the distrust between police and minority communities.
Although 47 percent of North Charleston's 100,000 inhabitants are black and 37 percent white, the city's police force is about 80 percent white, according to data collected by the Justice Department in 2007.
Racial tensions exploded in 2014, with violent clashes between the police and minorities that evoked the historic race-related riots of the 1960s.
Protests over Brown's killing extended from the sleepy town of Ferguson in Missouri to more than 170 cities throughout the country, including New York, Washington DC and Los Angeles.
One of the most tragic consequences of the protests was the killing of New York police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos on Dec. 20 by a black man seeking vengeance for black men killed by white police.
