 Pourzand was reportedly "secular to the core" and viewed the new rulers of the Islamic Republic with suspicion.In the late 1990s, he began to write a series of articles critical to the government, placing them in opposition newspapers.Among them was a piece on the funerals of Dariush and Parvaneh Eskandari Forouhar, victims of Iran's 1998 "Chain Murders", in which a series of prominent dissidents were murdered in their homes by members of Iran's intelligence agency.