Victims in three more villages affected by the mudflow in Sidoarjo, East Jakarta, will receive compensation under the revision to the 2007 presidential regulation currently being finalized.

Cabinet secretary Sudi Silalahi said Wednesday he would submit the revised regulation to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono soon after he received the draft from the Public Works Ministry.

"I will process the draft with the State Secretary and then submit it to the President for approval," Sudi said after meeting with Abdul Rahim, representative of victims from the three villages.

The revision was made to incorporate compensation for victims in Besuki, Kedungcangkring and Pejarakan, the three villages that were not covered under the presidential regulation on area boundaries and victims affected by the sludge.

Rahim said about 2,000 families in the three villages had long been awaiting the compensation payment, but were yet to get assurance from the government about when they would receive the money.

"The victims have suffered a lot, so we need a guarantee that the government will immediately disburse the money.

"Pak Sudi explained to me the compensation had yet to be paid out because there were several matters he needed to discuss with the Finance Ministry and the Public Works Ministry," he said.

"But now we can be a bit relieved that we will definitely get compensation because it has been allocated in the state budget and approved by the House of Representatives."

Suripto, a lawmaker from the Prosperous Justice Party, accompanied Rahim to the meeting with Sudi at the Cabinet secretary office.

At a Cabinet meeting in February, the government decided to earmark Rp 700 billion from the state budget to compensate victims in the three villages.

The government said it would also acquire residential land to accelerate the channeling of the mudflow from the nearby dam to the Porong river by building more channels through the three villages, which are located between the dam and the river.

But Sudi could not guarantee that victims would be able to receive compensation as soon as the revised regulation was issued.

"It is more about technical problems, but the most important thing is the government will soon issue the legal basis for the compensation," he said.

The government said the compensation payments for victims from the three villages would be made under a similar scheme to that used for those included in the current regulation.

The scheme arranged for compensation payments from PT Lapindo Brantas to be made in two installments.

Victims received 20 percent of the total compensation amount in the first installment, with the remaining 80 percent to be disbursed in the second installment.

Lapindo, linked to the family of chief welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie -- the country's richest man -- has been widely blamed for the devastating mudflow that started gushing out of a Lapindo drilling well on May 29, 2006.

International scientists recently said they were almost certain the mudflow had been caused by the faulty drilling of a gas exploration well -- not an earthquake as the company claimed.

Lapindo has said the sludge was triggered by an earthquake, measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, that occurred 250 kilometers from the site two days earlier.

"We are more certain than ever that the Lusi mud volcano is an unnatural disaster and was triggered by drilling the Banjar-Panji-1 well," Richard Davies, a geologist at Durham University in Britain, was quoted by AP as saying Tuesday.

He was the lead author of a study published this week in the academic journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters that said his team was 99 percent sure that drilling pressures caused a fluid leakage that led to an "underground blowout".

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