Three American students arrested in Cairo are safely back home and charge that prison guards threatened to shoot them if they moved and that accusations they threw Molotov cocktails at police are “lies.”

Egyptian authorities claim that the three young men studying at American University in Cairo were filmed hurling firebombs at police during recent demonstrations against the provisional military regime.

Their experience was far from a picnic, but the students were treated a lot better and released much sooner than Ilan Grapel, an American who moved to Israel, took out citizenship and fought with the IDF. He was arrested during the anti-Mubarak protests and charged with incitement and imprisoned for several months before being released recently when Israel agreed to free more than two dozen Egyptians in Israeli jails.

An Egyptian court ordered the students’ release on Thursday. The last of the three students to arrive home was Missouri resident Derik Sweeney, 19, who said they were threatened with rifles as they sat in a crowded cell. The first night was “probably the scariest night of my life eve. I was not sure I was going to live,” he told the Associated Press.

“They said if we moved at all, even an inch, they would shoot us. They were behind us with guns,” Sweeney added.

He added that he and his fellow students Luke Gates and Gregory Porter “never did anything to hurt anyone,” were not on the rooftop where police alleged they threw firebombs, and never handled explosives.

All of the accusations were “very clearly just lies, 100 percent,” according to Sweeney. He added that after the first night, jail conditions improved and guards stopped hitting them.

Despite their negative experience, Gates said after arriving in Indiana that Egypt is “still a great country.”