THE widow of the murdered headmaster Philip Lawrence supports his killer’s fight against the Home Secretary’s decision to move him from an open jail to a closed one.

Frances Lawrence is also considering resigning from the Philip Lawrence Awards, sponsored by the Home Office, because she is losing faith in the department.

“It feels peculiar, but I am on the side of Learco Chindamo, my husband’s killer,” she said. “I don’t really want to think of it as taking his side, but I feel that there has been an injustice and the Government has created that injustice. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”

Mrs Lawrence said that John Reid, the Home Secretary, had been cruel to transfer Chindamo in May from Ford open prison in West Sussex to Blakenhurst, a Category B jail that takes Category C prisoners, near Redditch.

Chindamo, the son of an Italian gangster and Filipino mother, was 15 when he stabbed Mr Lawrence to death outside St George’s Roman Catholic school in Maida Vale, northwest London, in 1995. He was sentenced to a minimum of 12 years without parole.

Chindamo was moved to Ford last year in preparation for his eventual release because he was no longer considered a risk to the public. But as a foreign prisoner who could be deported at the end of his sentence, Chindamo was moved back to a closed prison, along with many other foreign inmates.

The move came after the outrage at the sudden surge in foreign prisoners absconding from open jails this year.

This week Chindamo won the right to challenge the decision.

Mrs Lawrence said that she was sympathetic to Chindamo’s plight and accused the Home Office of having a “knee-jerk reaction” to the revelations that it had failed to consider more than 1,000 foreign prisoners for deportation at the end of their sentence.

Although Mrs Lawrence felt that Chindamo’s move to an open prison should have been more gradual, she said that his rehabilitation to the outside world would be affected by his sudden move to Blakenhurst.

After Chindamo was moved to Blakenhurst she wrote to the Probation Service saying that she was worried about his mental state. She emphasised her concern that it would be “traumatic” for him. Mrs Lawrence said that she did not receive a reply.

“Hopefully he was being helped in the open prison, but to bang him back into a closed prison was cruel. Rather bizarrely I wondered what it would do to him psychologically.

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