A British-Iranian woman jailed in Iran has had panic attacks since tensions between the country and the US escalated, her husband has said.

Richard Ratcliffe said the fallout from Donald Trump’s assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani was taking a toll on the mental health of his wife, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been detained since 2016 after she was arrested on espionage charges and jailed for five years.

She is among up to five people with dual British-Iranian nationality, or with UK connections, believed to be in prison in Iran. Their families have said they are being held as collateral and that the heightened tensions have made it harder to secure their release.

Timeline The buildup to Qassem Suleimani's death Show Hide A rocket attack on an Iraqi military base near Kirkuk kills an American contractor and injures US and Iraqi soldiers. The US blames Shia militia group, Kata’ib Hizbullah (KH) The US conducts retaliatory airstrikes against five KH bases in Iraq and Syria, saying there had been 11 attacks against Iraqi bases hosting coalition forces in Iraq over the past two months Protesters storm the US embassy in Baghdad, trapping diplomats inside while chanting “Death to America” and slogans in support of pro-Iranian militias. At one point they breached the main gate and smashed their way into several reception rooms. The rampage was carried out with the apparent connivance of local Iraqi security forces who allowed protesters inside the highly protected Green Zone In a drone strike ordered by US president Donald Trump, the US kills Iranian general Qassem Suleimani while he was being transported from Baghdad airport

Speaking on BBC Breakfast on Friday morning, Ratcliffe said: “This is a situation where there is a lot of anger in Iran and a lot of vulnerability, and it’s very stressful for the people involved.

“I mean, Nazanin was taken down to the clinic overnight two nights ago, through palpitations and panic attacks. So I think it’s important for the government to just do what they can.”

He said his wife had been given beta blockers to help calm her down. “We usually expect things to happen a week or 10 days later, so there is a sense of foreboding which is affecting all the prisoners,” said Ratcliffe, who will be meeting Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials on Friday.

Play Video 3:40 Why did Trump order the killing of Iran's Qassem Suleimani? – video explainer

“There’s certainly concerns. I think it’s a very tough time, and you have heard on the news this morning about other events in Iran, it’s just really sad,” he said, referring to reports that a Ukrainian passenger jet that crashed in Tehran on Wednesday was accidentally shot down by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile.

This week Ratcliffe criticised the killing of Suleimani, saying it was hard to demand Iran complies with the rule of law if its adversaries play fast and loose with the same law. He said the near-collapse in relations between the west and Iran made it difficult to convince his wife that her release from Evrin jail in Tehran may be imminent.

Speaking on Friday, Ratcliffe urged Boris Johnson to pay a £400m debt Britain owes Iran, as his wife now fears receiving a second jail sentence as Iran seeks revenge on the west. The sum has been outstanding since pre-revolutionary Iran paid the UK for 1,500 tanks in the 1970s.

The deal was cancelled after the shah of Iran was deposed in 1979, but, while Iran has demanded the money back, Britain has so far refused.