The Czech government on Thursday said it had bought a controversial pig farm located on the site of a former Nazi camp for Roma people, paying millions of euros for the right to shut it down."After 20 or so years, we finally managed to get rid of this harmful legacy from the past," Culture Minister Daniel Herman told reporters.

The farm was constructed in the 1970s during Communist rule at Lety, a village south of Prague which was the site of a Nazi-era concentration camp where hundreds of people in the Roma and Sinti minorities died in 1942 and 1943.

Human rights activists at home and abroad denounced its existence and the centre-left government of Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka to promise to find a solution before the end of his term this month.

The state bought the farm from the Agpi agricultural firm for 450 million koruna (18 million euros, $21 million) and will pay an additional 120 million koruna to clean the site.