Germany's education minister has resigned after being stripped of her doctorate because of plagiarism, in the second such case to hit Angela Merkel's government in two years.
Merkel announced on Saturday that she had accepted Annette Schavan's resignation "with a very heavy heart".
The move, an embarrassment for the German chancellor as she campaigns to win a third term in office, comes four days after the decision by the University of Düsseldorf to void Schavan's PhD because parts of her doctoral thesis had been copied. Another minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, quit as defence minister in 2011 over a plagiarised thesis.
Schavan, 57, has said she will take legal action against the decision to void her doctorate. "I will not accept the decision of the University of Düsseldorf and I will file a lawsuit against it," she told reporters during a visit to Johannesburg in South Africa.
The accusations of plagiarism were especially embarrassing for Schavan because she oversees Germany's universities and had previously been scathing in her criticism of Guttenberg, who resigned a month after losing his doctorate.
Members of Merkel's centre-right coalition said Schavan was the victim of a politically motivated campaign to damage the government before the autumn federal election.
In Tuesday's ruling, the Düsseldorf university commission said Schavan had "systematically and intentionally presented intellectual performance that in reality she did not generate herself". The decision left Schavan without an academic title as her degree programme in philosophy finished solely with a PhD.
Since the allegations arose in May, Schavan has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and said she wrote her dissertation with a clear conscience. Her lawyers have said the proceedings of the commission were riddled with mistakes and were unlawful, not least because information was leaked to the public in the process.