GREENVILLE, S.C.—Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump finished his South Carolina campaign on Friday night by praising a mass murder of Muslim prisoners in the early 1900s.

The murder never actually happened: Trump, it appears, was credulously repeating an online hoax. Regardless, his words represented yet another escalation of his open Islamophobia and his explicit support for war crimes.

Trump is running on a proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country. He made the new remarks near the end of his speech in North Charleston on the eve of the crucial South Carolina primary in which he leads in the polls.

Speaking in his usual extemporaneous style, he vowed to go “much, much, much further than waterboarding,” the torture tactic defended by some conservatives. He said: “I read a story. It’s a terrible story, but I’ll tell you. Should I tell you or should I not?”

The crowd asked for the story.

Trump described the late U.S. general John Pershing, a “rough” man. He then claimed, approvingly, that Pershing had summarily executed 49 Muslim prisoners during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in the early-1900s — and had added religious insult to the supposed killings by dipping the bullets in the bloods of pigs, which Muslims are forbidden to consume.

“This was a terrible problem. They were having terrorism problems just like we do,” he said. “And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and he took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. You heard that, right? He took 50 bullets! And he dipped them in pigs’ blood.

“And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, OK? Twenty-five years there wasn’t a problem.”

He concluded by linking the story to present-day problems for a second time.

“So we better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks,” he said.

The myth-busting website Snopes found no evidence to support the story, which has circulated by email since at least 2001. Snopes found anecdotal accounts that Pershing or other military leaders had threatened to bury Muslims along with pig carcasses.

Trump’s remarks were first reported by MSNBC.

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