A crowd of 300 young people on Sunday sexually assaulted three women near Tahrir Square, according to a report on the website of Egypt’s flagship paper Al-Ahram.

After the assault, which took place near the Qasr al-Dobara Church that is used as a field hospital in the current protests, the women ran to the nearby Mugamma administrative building in Tahrir Square, the Al-Ahram journalist present wrote about the incident.

Their assaulters followed them there, but the employees of the building closed the doors to block them out. Dozens of other demonstrators, who had been holding a sit-in in the square, then beat the assaulters with sticks and rocks to disperse them, and took the women to their tents in the center of the square.

The report said the Al-Ahram photographer could not take pictures of the women being assaulted, as the assaulters threatened to destroy his camera.

Incidents of sexual assault have been increasingly reported during protests in and around Tahrir Square during the transitional period.

*Correction: This article previously stated that three girls were assaulted near Tahrir Square. It has been corrected to identify them as women.