Wellington – About 10,000 houses built by international aid agencies for tsunami victims in Indonesia are unfit for human habitation and may have to be rebuilt, a newspaper reported Wednesday.

Heru Prasetyo, a director at BRR, the agency in charge of rebuilding Indonesia's Aceh province and nearby Nias Island, which were hardest hit by the earthquake and tsunami that struck Asia on December 26, 2004, revealed the housing problems during a visit this week to New Zealand, Wellington's Dominion Post reported.

Prasetyo headed an Indonesian delegation sent to thank the New Zealand government and local aid agencies for their contributions to the region's recovery programme.

Indonesian officials told New Zealand aid agencies that some new houses built in Aceh were substandard and had no running water, sewerage or wastewater outlets. Prasetyo said the faulty houses would have to be rebuilt, but he would not name the aid agencies responsible.

BRR figures showed that just 16,000 of the 120,000 houses planned for Aceh and Nias had been completed with another 13,000 under construction, the paper said.

New Zealander Kevin Duignan, an International Red Cross construction project coordinator in Aceh, told the paper that he was aware that some unacceptable replacement houses were lying empty. He said that some had been built with untreated timbers and already been eaten out by termites.

Duignan said the Red Cross was committed to building 22,500 houses, which would have sanitation and running water if approved by its Geneva-based headquarters and BRR.