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Tegucigalpa - The newly-appointed leader of Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, ordered a 48-hour curfew starting late Sunday, after denying there had been a coup d'etat on deposed President Manuel Zelaya.

"A curfew begins today and ends on Tuesday," Micheletti said at his first news conference since being appointed by Congress to replace Zelaya.

"I came to the presidency not by a coup d'etat but by a completely legal process as set out in our laws," Micheletti, a member of Zelaya's own Liberal Party, said earlier after being sworn in by Congress.

"What we have done here is an act of democracy, because our army has complied with the order of the court, prosecutors and judges," he added, to loud applause from lawmakers.

"Our national army...complied with the constitution."

Honduran forces ousted Zelaya on Sunday and flew him out of the country to Costa Rica, ending a bitter power struggle with the military, as parliament swiftly voted in a new leader.

The Supreme Court said Sunday it had ordered the president's ouster to protect law and order in the nation of about seven million people.

As Congress approved speaker Micheletti as the new interim president, it said it had voted unanimously to remove Zelaya from office for his "apparent misconduct," and for "repeated violations of the constitution and the law and disregard of orders and judgments of the institutions."

Micheletti promised to govern with "transparency and honesty" and "work tirelessly to restore peace and tranquility that we have lost."

He will stay in office until Jan. 27, 2010, when the new president, elected in November elections, is due to take over.

Zelaya, who was elected in November 2005 to a nonrenewable four-year term, had sought to revise the constitution through a referendum to allow him to run again in the next elections.

The Supreme Court had ruled such a referendum illegal, but Zelaya had tried to press ahead with a vote on Sunday anyway.

Meanwhile according to Yediot Ahronot  Israeli Foreign Ministry has issued a travel warning in light of recent troubles, but Israeli businessmen say there is no sign of violence so far.

"If this is what a revolution looks like then everything I've read in (Gabriel) Garcia Marquez's books is very nice for literature – but it doesn't hold up in reality," Yisrael Snir told Ynet on Sunday from Honduras. But Snir, an Israeli who co-owns a fish-farming company there, acknowledges that he will be staying in tonight as a curfew has been imposed following the events of the day.