INTERNATIONAL: Sri Lankan police fired tear gas and water cannon on Thursday (May 19) to push back student protesters who marched through the streets of Colombo, demanding the arrest and removal of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Hundreds of students carrying black flags marched on Colombo's central Fort area, chanting slogans against the government. Police fired repeated rounds of tear gas and water cannon to push them back.

ONE OF THE PROTESTERS, NIXON (NO SURNAME GIVEN), SAID:

"Sri Lankan government - they are killing the young people. This is right or wrong? They are terrorists, Gotabaya is a terrorist, Rajapaksa is terrorist. We don't need leaders like these. We don't give up, we want to throw out this Rajapaksa family and the 225 leaders (lawmakers) out of Sri Lanka. They are thieves, they are the terrorists in Sri Lanka."

Sri Lanka's economic crisis has come from the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic battering the tourism-reliant economy, rising oil prices, running out of medicines, foreign reserves, and populist tax cuts by the government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother, Mahinda, who resigned as prime minister last week.

Other factors have included heavily subsidised domestic prices of fuel and a decision to ban the import of chemical fertilisers, which devastated the agriculture sector.

Sri Lanka's central bank has secured foreign exchange to pay for fuel and cooking gas shipments that will ease crippling shortages, its governor said on Thursday, but police fired tear gas and water canon to push back student protesters.

Most of Sri Lanka's petrol stations have run dry as the island nation battles its most devastating economic crisis since independence in 1948.

Inflation hit 29.8% in April with food prices up 46.6% year-on-year.

Sri Lanka is also officially now in default on its sovereign debt as a so-called grace period to make some already-overdue bond interest payments expired on Wednesday.

The G7 economic powers support efforts to provide debt relief for Sri Lanka, G7 finance chiefs said on Thursday in a draft communique from a meeting in Germany after the country defaulted on its sovereign debt.

^{PHOTO: POLICE USING WATER CANNON, TEAR GAS ON PROTESTING STUDENTS/ PROTESTING STUDENTS THROWING BACK TEAR GAS SHELLS ON POLICE/PEOPLE RUNNING/ PROTESTERS ARGUING WITH POLICE/ SOUNDBITE OF A PROTESTER/ STUDENTS MARCHING THROUGH COLOMBO}