Sri Lanka PM Ranil Wickremesinghe agrees to step down after protesters storm President's house

Earlier in the day Prime Minister Wickremesinghe had summoned an urgent cabinet meeting to discuss a "swift resolution" to a potential power vacuum that was created after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled his official residence Saturday following protests.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding the resignation of Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa stormed the President's House here on Saturday after overcoming stiff resistance put up by security forces, leaving an unspecified number of people injured.

The protesters, mostly young and male, some of them waving Sri Lankan flags, broke the police barricades on Chatham Street in Colombo's Fort area and entered the President's House where Rajapaksa was not present, journalists at the site said.

Police used tear gas and water cannons and also opened fire in the air in a desperate bid to scatter the mass gathering but could not prevent the protesters from entering the President's House.

Some demonstrators scaled the boundary walls while others poured in through the main gate. They then briskly walked into the normally heavily-fortified house, all the time shouting anti-government slogans.

Saturday's action came a month after mass protests forced Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa to quit and take shelter in a military camp in the eastern port city of Trincomalee.

The Rajapaksa brothers -- part of a large clan -- are widely blamed for Sri Lanka's worst economic crisis.