HONG KONG - Hong Kong's leader said the territory's health chief resigned today after coming under severe criticism for a slow and sloppy response to last year's SARS outbreak.

Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa said he had accepted Dr. Yeoh Eng-kiong's resignation to help ease public concerns, but he also praised Yeoh for improving the quality of Hong Kong's health system by fixing shortcomings that came to light during the fight against SARS.

Earlier in the day, lawmakers from Hong Kong's top three political parties demanded Yeoh's removal. Yeoh became a rare political casualty in a territory where critics charge that Tung's top aides often avoid being held accountable for poor performance.

A legislative report released Monday said that Yeoh had performed his job inadequately - paying too little attention to SARS when it was spreading in mainland China in early 2003 and later issuing statements that misled a nervous public about the severity of the disease after it arrived in Hong Kong.

SARS infected 1,755 people here last year and killed 299 of them and threw the territory into an economic crisis as people stayed indoors and visitors stayed away.

Tung said that when SARS first struck Hong Kong, it was an unknown disease but that hard work by health officials finally brought it under control.

Yeoh appeared next to Tung at the news conference.

Yeoh spoke briefly, saying it had been an "honor" to serve Hong Kong for 33 years. He left without taking questions. Tung said Yeoh would stay on the job for a short while until a successor is chosen.

After the Legislative Council Select Committee issued its report on Monday, Yeoh apologized to everyone in Hong Kong - including SARS victims, survivors of the dead and health care workers - but avoided questions about whether he would step down.

Dozens of relatives of SARS victims protested outside the Legislative Council earlier today to demand that Yeoh step down and lawmakers of all stripes agreed.

"A public apology is not enough," said Yeung Sum, chairman of the opposition Democratic Party. "He should shoulder the political responsibility."

The legislative report found that Yeoh "did not show sufficient alertness" when a mysterious disease spread through neighboring Guangdong province in mainland China in January and February of 2003 - and Hong Kong was caught off guard when the respiratory ailment later identified as SARS came to Hong Kong in February.

Hong Kong's public hospitals had no systemwide contingency plans for dealing with large-scale outbreaks of infectious diseases, and lawmakers accused Yeoh of "failing in his monitoring role."

As the disease sickened more people in Hong Kong, residents feared it had moved beyond hospitals and was spreading to the community at large. But Yeoh held two press conferences in March in which it appeared "he was trying to downplay the severity of the outbreak," the report found.

A few days later he was asked to clarify his remarks, "but he failed to do so," the report said.

While Yeoh apologized for his shortcomings, he also sought also to defend his performance by noting that health officials were dealing at first with an unknown disease and they "worked tirelessly and selflessly around the clock" to control it.