During this hiatus from the party he carried out five assassinations according to his confessions. Four of the victims were party members suspected of selling information to the police after the 1953 coup, one of these being Hesham Lankrani, a member of a prominent clerical family from Azerbaijan. The fifth killing was of Mohammad Massoud, a maverick newspaper editor and opponent of the regime. Roozbeh thought that "the assassination of such a popular anticourt journalist ... would polarize Iran and thus radicalize the Tudeh," and emphasized that he carried out the Massoud assassination without the party's knowledge. In the words of Ervand Abrahamian, "Roozbeh was a radical in the tradition of Bakhunin — not of Marx and Engels."