Khosro Roozbeh

Roozbeh was wounded and captured after a shootout in July 1957. He was interrogated, tried in camera, and executed secretly in Qezel Qal'eh prison in May 1958. Before the execution his legs were broken up. One of Roozbeh more controversial activities was confessed to interrogators before he died.

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."

In his political beliefs Roozbeh opposed liberalism and deemed some of the Tudeh leaders "mere reformers," "bourgeois liberals," and "parliamentary lobbyists." In his memoirs, Ovanessian praises Roozbeh as a sincere but impatient radical in need of a firm hand Writing in another book, Ervand Abrahamian describes him as being "contemptuous" of the Tudeh party "for being too `moderate`," and resigning from it at the time of the trial and "not rejoined until the early 1950s."

Involved in left-wing groups, he was arrested after a mutiny in Khurasan and put on trial in 1946. There he declared himself a "full-fledged revolutionary" who did not belong to the "merely ... reformist" Tudeh party. He was convicted of spreading sedition, cashiered from the army and sentenced to 15 years hard labor. He escaped four years later and set up the Military Organization of the Tudeh party (made up of members of the Iranian military). By 1954 the organization had over 500 members.

Khosro Roozbeh (Persian: خسرو روزبه) (24 August 1915 – 11 May 1958) was an Iranian military officer, mathematician, writer on political and cultural affairs and the chief of military branch of the Communist Tudeh Party of Iran and has been called "probably the most controversial as well as the best-known martyr of the communist movement in Iran".