COLOMBO, Jan. 9-- Maithripala Sirisena had won victory in Sri Lanka presidential election on Friday, the country' s biggest opposition party UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe said at a press conference.

Mahinda Rajapaksa said that he would hand over power during meeting with Ranil early Friday morning before his left president residence.

Ranil noted that, Mahinda Rajapaksa is the president who ended the war and people respect that. "We are trying to make a change for good governance. So no one should resort to violence. Do not create instability. We must allow Maithripala Sirisena to take oaths. The law will be implemented to the letter. I have given instructions to police," Ranil told the press conference.

Sirisena, a former government minister who later changed sides to become the opposition's candidate in November, has vowed to root out corruption and bring constitutional reforms to weaken the power of the presidency.

Rajapaksa won handsomely in the last election in 2010, surfing a wave of popularity that sprang from the defeat in the previous year of ethnic Tamil separatists who had waged a war against the state for decades

Earlier results showed Rajapaksa remained popular among the country's Sinhala Buddhists, who account for around 70 percent of the population, but his challenger had taken a strong lead from the ethnic Tamil-dominated former war zone in the north of the country and Muslims-dominated areas.