CAIRO, Aug 25 (Aswat Masriya) – A group of political movements' leaders urged the prosecutor general to release detainees held pending trial during a meeting on Monday.

Former presidential candidate and Popular Current founder Hamdeen Sabahi submitted a memorandum to Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat calling for the release of Amr Adel. Adel has been held pending trial for over a month; he is accused of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, listed as a terrorist organisation last December.

Sabahi stressed that Adel is not a Brotherhood member, according to a Popular Current statement released on Monday. He expressed his readiness to testify to the prosecution that Adel is a Popular Current member.

Attendants of Monday's meeting, who included the president of the Dostour liberal party Hala Shukrallah, also called for the release of detainees held pending trial for violating last year's protest law. They issued a memorandum urging for the release of 23 detainees arrested on June 21 while taking part in a march calling for the repeal of the law.

The protest law, issued by former interim President Adli Mansour in November to regulate peaceful assembly, has long been the epicentre of wide criticism by domestic and international human rights organisations which say it violates international standards for peaceful protests.

Khaled Dawoud, the Dostour Party spokesman who attended the meeting, told Aswat Masriya that expanding the period of detention pending trial has become an "additional penalty".

The prosecutor general ordered an investigation into the submitted memoranda, the Popular Current said.

The military ouster of former Islamist President Mohamed Mursi has been followed by a wide campaign of arrests which has targeted Islamist as well as secular political activists.

Wiki Thawra, an independent database dedicated to documenting statistics related to the January 25 uprising, said in May that over 41,000 have been arrested since Mursi's ouster.