There are growing concerns that the prison housing the British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Tehran is facing a mass coronavirus outbreak after reports of three cases in a part of the jail.

The reports of coronavirus at the notorious Evin prison came as a well-known reformist politician announced he had tested positive for the illness and called on the Iranian judiciary to release prisoners to prevent an epidemic sweeping through the country’s unsanitary jails.

Sherry Ashoori, the wife of another British-Iranian prisoner, Anoosheh Ashoori, said that her husband and other inmates on Evin’s Ward 12 were resisting plans to transfer them to Ward 4, believed to have housed coronavirus cases. She has asked the Foreign Office to intervene.

Richard Ratcliffe, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, said he