Moon Dae-sung, the disgraced lawmaker-elect who recently quit the ruling party over suspected plagiarism, has offered to resign as a professor at a Busan university, school officials said Monday.

Moon, an athlete member of the International Olympic Committee, submitted a letter of resignation to Dong-A University last Friday, amid suspicion of plagiarism in obtaining his doctorate in taekwondo by copying parts of a local scholar's doctoral thesis, said the officials.

Moon, who won a seat in a district in the southern port city of Busan in the April 11 general elections, withdrew from the ruling Saenuri Party on April 20, when Seoul's Kookmin University, from which he earned his doctorate in 2007, determined that much of his paper matched another person's work.

Moon was hired by the Busan university as an associate professor in taekwondo without a Ph.D. degree in 2005 after winning a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Dong-A University launched a committee last week to investigate Moon's plagiarism allegations, the officials said, adding that they will also look into another suspicion that papers for his master's degree were partly copied. (Yonhap)