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Sri Lankan president to resign on July 13, news aggregator says citing parliament speaker

On Saturday, an emergency meeting of the leaders of political parties chaired by Speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena was held in the wake of mass protests

NEW DELHI, July 9. /TASS/. Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will step down on July 13, the NewsWire news aggregator said on Saturday citing Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena.

According to NewsWire, Rajapaksa has informed that he will resign on July 13.

On Saturday, an emergency meeting of the leaders of political parties chaired by Speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena was held in the wake of mass protests. The participants in the meeting agreed that incumbent President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe should resign and that the speaker of the parliament should take over as provisional president for no longer than 30 days. Sri Lanka’s parliament will elect president for the remaining term. Additionally, the meeting ruled to appoint a provisional all-party government and to hold elections in the near future.

Earlier in the day, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Colombo, demanding Rajapaksa’s resignation. They stormed his residence and then the prime minister’s residence Temple Trees, which they later set it on fire. Over 30 people were injured in the protests. Wickremesinghe announced amid the riots that he would step down.

The protests sparked by financial and economic crises have engulfed the country since early April. As Wickremesinghe told TASS in an exclusive interview, Sri Lanka is hit hard by the worst crisis in modern history, and the island nation’s politicians cannot yet find parallels to such a crisis in this century or in the last century or the century before. According to the prime minister, the country is currently in the middle of the crisis.

Wickremesinghe pointed out that Sri Lanka was facing severe shortages of foreign currencies, fuel and petroleum products, fertilizers, food for some groups of the population, and medicines. According to his estimates, it will take three years or even more to recover from the economic crisis.

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