CAIRO — An Egyptian criminal court on Sunday released on bail a leading liberal activist charged with holding unauthorized protests in a ruling some saw as an effort by authorities to cool political tensions ahead of an expected presidential election.

Judge Mohamed al Fiqqy set bail at 10,000 Egyptian pounds, about $1,400, each for Alaa Abdel Fatah, a prominent dissident who helped spur the 2011 uprising that led to the fall of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and Ahmed Abdel Rahman, a security guard who was arrested for carrying a knife near a demonstration.

Both men had been held for four months. The next court date was set for April 6.

Spectators in the courtroom cheered when the judge announced his ruling, and political commentators expressed hope that it was a sign the government was reassessing its eight-month-long crackdown on opponents of all stripes since its ouster July 3 of President Mohammed Morsi.

That hope was bolstered Sunday when the family of jailed Al-Jazeera correspondent Mohamed Fadel Fahmy said it had received a letter from Egyptian President Adly Mansour, promising a speedy trial in his case.

The government charges that Fahmy, who holds both Canadian and Egyptian citizenship, ran a terrorist cell and fabricated news from Al-Jazeera’s temporary office in the luxurious Marriott Hotel.

According to government figures, at least 16,000 people Islamists and liberals have been arrested since Morsi’s ouster on charges that include protesting the government, terrorism and speaking out in a way that harms national security.

The result has been overcrowded prisons, overtaxed courts and a climate of fear just three years after an uprising that sought democratic reforms.

Two days later, officers stormed Abdel Fattah’s home, beating him and his wife.

All 25 defendants were charged with assembling illegally, stopping traffic and assaulting security forces and stealing police two-way radios.

“It is like the throwing of the dice. It has nothing to do with the rule of law or cleverness of the lawyers,” said Abdel Fattah’s lawyer, Saif El Deen, himself a long time activist who was arrested during Mubarak’s era.

The preceding court session offered an example of El Deen’s complaint. In that case, a group of Islamist lawyers defending two leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, the secretive group through which Morsi rose to power, said they now had so many cases that they can’t keep up and that they fear arrest.

One lawyer, Khalid Badawy, told the judge that his client had two court sessions at the same time in two different courts, leaving him unsure where to go and whether his client would be there.

And he said in today’s Egypt, he fears that he too could be arrested.

“At least 300 lawyers had been arrested,” often when they went to attend the interrogations of their defendants, Badawy told the judge. “Seeing my colleagues getting arrested is a threat for me.”

• MCT Campus