Amina Sboui, a jailed Tunisian activist with the topless protest group Femen, went on trial Monday for contempt and defamation after charging that detainees were tortured in her prison.

The trial in a court in M'Saken, 150 kilometers (95 miles) south of Tunis, comes two months after Sboui was arrested and after four prison guards filed charges against her and another women, Rabiaa, detained in the same jail.

Tunisia's Tamarod movement, which has called for the dissolution of the National Constituent Assembly, is endangering the country's democratic process, Islamist Prime Minister Ali Larayedh said on Monday.

"This copycat group which calls itself Tamarod is clear, and I think it represents a danger to the democratic process, an attempt to make it fail in Tunisia," Larayedh said in a radio interview.

Several thousand people protested in central Tunis on Saturday against the Egyptian army's overthrow of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.

The protest was called by Tunisia's ruling Islamist Ennahda party.

The trial of Tunisian television chief Sami Fehri, accused of corruption during the rule of now-toppled strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, opened Friday with the defense requesting bail and the court denying it.

Fehri, who runs the private Ettounsiya TV and was a business partner of Ben Ali's fugitive brother-in-law Belhassen Trabelsi, was arrested last August accused of having illegally used state television funds to bolster his own production company Cactus Prod.

Tunisian authorities early on Thursday released from jail two former figures of the toppled regime who were arrested following the 2011 uprising for abuse of power, the justice ministry said.

Mohammed Ghariani, ex-secretary general of the Rally for Constitutional Democracy party of now ousted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and former interior minister Abdallah Kallel were ordered freed by Tunis Appeals Court, the ministry said.

The Tunisian presidency said on Monday it would extend by three months the state of emergency in place since the uprising that toppled former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011.

"The president of the republic Moncef Marzouki decided to extend the state of emergency by three months," the official TAP news agency reported.

Tunisia's public prosecutor Monday ordered police to investigate an attack on 19 actors by Salafist Muslims, while they decided whether to charge the artists with alleged "indecency", a lawyer for the drama group said.

"The public prosecutor decided ...to allow the investigation to progress so that police officers could hear the artists' statements as victims," their lawyer Ghazi Mrabet said.

Tunisia's public prosecutor is due to question 19 actors who were attacked by radical Salafist Muslims for alleged "indecent" behavior, their lawyer told Agence France Presse on Sunday.

The actors are to appear on Monday before the public prosecutor who is expected to charge them with "indecent acts", Ghazi Mrabet said, although the exact nature of what they are accused of remains unclear.

President Moncef Marzouki on Thursday ruled out the risk of Tunisia's elected authorities being deposed, after Egypt's army ousted its head of state, while stressing the need to "pay attention" to popular demands.

"Could Tunisia witness the same (Egyptian) scenario? I don't think so, because it's missing the fundamental ingredients. Here we have a professional, republican army that has never got mixed up with politics," he said.

A movement called Tamarod has launched a petition to have Tunisia's National Assembly dissolved, in a campaign similar to the one in Egypt that led to the army ousting the president, one of its organizers said Thursday.

"We don't want any support from the political parties to protect our credibility," Mohamed Bennour told Agence France Presse.