The Danish Prime Minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, has apologised to a group of Greenland Inuits who were evicted from their homes and hunting-grounds more than forty years ago to allow for the expansion of a key American air -base.

The apology comes two weeks after a court in Copenhagen awarded the Inuits collective damages of more than seventy-thousand dollars, saying their eviction had been a serious infringement of their rights.

The Inuits were expelled when a NATO radar surveillance base at Thule in north-western Greenland was expanded in the early years of the Cold War.