A German TV comic, Jan Boehmermann, has been placed under police protection after he read an obscene poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, BBC News reports.

A police spokesperson said a patrol car had been parked in front of his house.

Erdogan has filed a criminal complaint against the satirist in a case that has prompted a debate in Germany over freedom of speech.

German prosecutors are investigating whether he broke a law against insulting foreign leaders.

Public broadcaster ZDF announced earlier on Tuesday, April 12 that his weekly satire programme would not go ahead this week because of the "vast amount of media reporting and the resulting focus on the programme and its presenter".

It was not immediately clear if a concrete threat had been made against Boehmermann but Cologne police told German media: "When you can't rule something out then you have to do something."

Bild website reported that the satirist and his family were apparently facing a threat from supporters of the Turkish president. No request for protection measures had come from the comic but were a result of risk analysis, reports said.

Boehmermann, considered Germany's most incisive satirist, had read the obscene poem on his Neo Magazin Royale programme on 31 March, making clear that it included material that broke German laws on free speech. Section 103 of the criminal code bans insulting representatives or organs belonging to foreign states.

Days earlier, another German TV programme that poked fun at President Erdogan had prompted the Turkish government to summon the German ambassador in protest.

On that occasion, both Germany and the EU insisted that press freedom was inviolable.

However, Chancellor Angela Merkel became involved in the latest row, when she told Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu that Boehmermann's poem had been "deliberately offensive". The poem itself has been removed from ZDF's website.