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Party membership suspended: politician Jeffrey Donaldson
Photo: Liam Mcburney / dpa
The leader of Northern Ireland's Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) Jeffrey Donaldson has resigned from his position with immediate effect. The party has received a letter from Donaldson in which he confirms that he "has been confronted with allegations of a historic nature," according to a statement from the party on Friday.
According to party guidelines, the MP in the British House of Commons was also suspended from his party membership pending the outcome of legal proceedings. At an emergency meeting, the party leadership appointed MP Gavin Robinson as interim leader.
Social media accounts deleted
It was initially unclear what kind of allegations would be made against Donaldson. The politician is said to have hastily deleted his social media accounts.
Just a few weeks ago, Donaldson led his party as a junior partner in a government with the Catholic-Republican Sinn Fein. In doing so, he ended a year-long boycott by the DUP in protest against the Brexit rules for Northern Ireland, which had paralyzed the political institutions in the part of the country that belongs to the United Kingdom.
The politician who recently tried to achieve balance rejected the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which ended the decades-long civil war in Northern Ireland.
boy/AFP/dpa