President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has filed a criminal complaint against Wolfgang Kubicki, the vice president of Germany's Federal Parliament, Bianet reported on Friday.

Through his attorney in Cologne, Mustafa Kaplan, Erdoğan yesterday (September 29) filed a complaint with the Hildesheim Prosecutor's Office, demanding Kubicki be put on trial for "insult and slander," Deutsche Welle Turkish reported.

Kubicki had called Erdoğan a "sewer rat" (abwasserratte) in the in a speech he delivered last week as part of the Lower Saxony state election campaign.

He told Germany's state-run news agency dpa that he would not hesitate to enter into a legal fight against Erdoğan.

The fact that Erdoğan has filed about 200,000 similar lawsuits since he became the president speaks for itself, said the politician.

Attorney Kaplan told DW Turkish, "Mr. Kubicki is an experienced politician, a renowned lawyer and also the vice president of the Federal Parliament. He is of the qualification to know his words are insulting, and insult is a crime. He knowingly insulted [Erdoğan] and should pay the price for that."

In 2016, Erdoğan had also filed a criminal complaint against Jan Böhmermann, a comedian from Germany, for "insulting a foreign state official."

Prosecutors had dismissed that investigation, and the mentioned offense had been removed from the country's criminal code.