Ukrainian Interior Minister Yury Lutsenko announced Tuesday that he had tendered his resignation in the wake of his purported drunken scuffle with German police at the Frankfurt airport last week.

Lutsenko asked the Ukrainian parliament and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to accept his resignation, according to a statement on the minister's web site.

The minister told a news conference that his resignation was the result of an "ongoing dirty campaign against me and my son" and that he planned to sue the sensationalist German daily newspaper Bild over its coverage of the incident.

"My lawyers are already preparing a lawsuit against the newspaper," Lutsenko said, Gazeta.ru reported.

German police have confirmed local media reports that a heavily intoxicated Lutsenko was detained at the airport on May 4 after he and his son, Oleksandr, physically resisted police intervention when they were prevented from boarding a Lufthansa flight to Seoul.

Lutsenko, however, claims that Germany's "yellow press" published false information about the incident, which he said was resolved after a high-ranking German police official offered his apologies.

In a statement posted on his ministry's web site Tuesday, Lutsenko claimed that he tried in vain to submit to a medical examination after airline staff told him that he could not fly "because of 'suspected intoxication.'"

"Then without explanation, police rounded up each member of our delegation and arrested my son," the minister said in the statement.

Bild has reported that Gßnter Hefner, the deputy police chief in the German state of Hessen, was brought in to calm down the agitated minister.

Lutsenko said in the statement Tuesday that Hefner "officially apologized for the actions of subordinates and asked me not to hold any grudges against police and at Germany as a whole."

Citing police reports, German media reported that when police officers arrived to deal with the incident, Lutsenko and his 19-year-old son punched them and called them "Nazi swine," among other pejoratives.

Four police officers were injured in the dust-up, some with bruised testicles, the weekly magazine Focus reported, citing an official police report to German Interior Minister Wolfgang SchÊuble.

Lutsenko's resignation, which must be approved by Ukraine's parliament, will leave the country without three major cabinet members: the finance, foreign and interior ministers.

The scandal is the latest in Ukraine's turbulent political scene, and Lutsenko suggested that his opponents were fanning the flames.

"I have become the victim of a banal situation blown up into a political scandal because of domestic squabbles inside Ukraine," he told reporters in Kiev, Interfax reported.

Deputies from the pro-Russian Party of Regions on Tuesday threatened to block the parliament's work if it did not vote to oust Lutsenko, an erstwhile ally of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.

But Nikolai Martynenko, leader of the pro-Yushchenko parliamentary bloc Our Ukraine-People's Self-Defense, said his faction would not support the move.

"We won't vote on a decision put to us by the yellow press," Martynenko was quoted as saying by Interfax.