Paul Helfeld (also given as Hefeld),[12] aged 21 in 1909, and Jacob Lepidus (also reported as Lapidus),[13] who was 25 the same year, were Jewish-Latvian immigrants. They had been members of the Latvian Socialist Party and, although they had not held positions of responsibility, they had smuggled revolutionary literature into Russia for the party.[14][15] The pair had been living in Paris in 1907, along with Lepidus's brother Paul, a revolutionary bomber who went under the nom de guerre "Strygia"; Jacob was described in The Times as a "member of a notorious Russian revolutionary family".[15] On 1 May 1907 Paul Lepidus was killed when a bomb he was carrying to assassinate Armand Fallières, the President of France, exploded prematurely. Lepidus and Helfeld fled the country and lived in Scotland for a year, before moving to Tottenham.[16][17]