The Chagos Islands, a tropical archipelago just south of the equator off the tip of India, have been under British control since 1814. They have been known as the British Indian Ocean Territory since 1965 when they were split off from Mauritius, a then-U.K. colony that gained independence three years later.

The United Kingdom agreed last week to return the Chagos Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean, to the African nation of Mauritius after buying the islands and forcibly removing its native inhabitants in the late 1960s to make way for a U.

Strategically located between East Africa and Southeast Asia, Diego Garcia serves as a surveillance centre for the Middle East. It was critical to air operations during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Britain struck a deal allowing it to keeping control of a strategically important UK-US military base in the Indian Ocean for another century, while ceding sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

LONDON (AP) — The British government agreed Thursday to hand sovereignty of the long-contested Chagos Islands, an archipelago of more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, in a deal that secures the future of a strategically important U.K.-U.S. military base.

The British government announced last week that it is handing the Chagos Islands to Mauritius under an agreement that will see the American naval and bomber base stay on one of the islands, Diego Garcia.