Mustafa Salahuddin, who is also president of the Association for Rights and Freedoms in Egypt, and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Daily Beast they were “stunned” by the decision.

“When they took the pictures, I assumed that they meant to show the people, not the images,” Salahuddin said. “As soon as they told me to delete the pictures, I realized that this was not a decision taken with the intention to avoid harming minors, but in order to save face.”

For their part, the group said the decision to shut down the Facebook page had nothing to do with the photos, in which only the faces of women were shown. The group also noted a section on the group’s page highlighting the number of photos with nudity, including about 20 of female nudity only.

“The group is a platform for the dissemination of all kinds of news, information, analyses, photographs, memes, pictures, videos and pictures of women and photos of men. In a democratic country, citizens are not entitled to a public lynching of those who have not submitted to their will,” the organization said in a statement to The Daily Beast.

As an international media organization, the group said it “dissatisfied with all social media sites” in Egypt, which has been trying to fight free speech by shutting down dozens of websites. To date, it said, only a handful of sites had been taken offline in all of Egypt, and the remainder appeared live.

“Our goal is to get the images back on Facebook and remove the Facebook content that was related to the group,” said Alaa Akram, who is based in Egypt but was at a news conference in Washington at the time the suspension took place.

Egypt’s decision “could have been far worse,” said the Egyptian American Council spokesperson, Charles Lewis, who is also an officer of the Council and has visited Egypt several times during the coup.

“All the images in question had already been removed in other parts of the world by Egyptians, and I mean everyone from women to men to the entire world who had a stake in the news that these children were seen. Had Facebook not done their own investigation, [U.S. Secretary of State John] Kerry and the world of press would’ve had the images back long ago,” Lewis said.

Lewis said he doesn’t expect the images to be removed