The nomination of US President Donald Trump for this year's Nobel Peace Prize was ‘fake,’ a member of the award committee has said.

Concerning ‘the nomination of the US president, I can say that we have good reason to believe it is a fake nomination,’ Olav Njolstad, non-voting secretary of the Nobel Committee, told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK late Tuesday.

A police complaint had been made, he said about the fake nomination, but declined to offer further details about what raised suspicions.

A total of 329 nominations have been made for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norway-based award committee said.

But Njolstad wouldn't provide any details. ‘We never comment on valid nominations - that would violate our statutes,’ he said.

Njolstad is also head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which assists the five-strong panel in vetting nominated candidates.

The institute had no further comment on the suspected fake Trump nomination when contacted by dpa Wednesday.

The 329 nominations - comprising 217 individuals and 112 organizations - were the second-highest number to date.

In Norway, Henrik Urdal, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) recently told a daily he had information that Trump had been nominated.

‘We are investigating what the status is, to establish whether the information we received was inaccurate or not,’ he told dpa.

The record of 376 candidates was set in 2016, the year Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded for his role in ending a more-than-50-year-long civil war.

The peace prize, first awarded in 1901, was endowed by the Swedish inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel.

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