The Kwara State Police Command yesterday paraded 14 suspects in connection with the fracas that has claimed five lives in parts of Ilorin, the state capital, with a warning to politicians to stop doling out money to thugs.

There has been uneasy calm at Alore, Ode-Alausa, Omoda, Abayawo, Oloje in Ilorin metropolis since Friday when hoodlums engaged themselves following disagreement on the sharing of handouts given by a politician.

The crisis began after the defection of some All Progressives Congress (APC) members to Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state.

The state's Commissioner of Police, Mr. Ambrose Aisabo, who confirmed the death of only three of the hoodlums, added that 15 vehicles were destroyed in the fracas while many people injured.

He said investigation is ongoing with a view to ascertaining the culpability of a prominent politician, who doled out the money that turned the hoodlums against one another.

The commissioner, who flayed the idea of doling out "peanuts" to hoodlums by politicians, warned them to desist and channel the money into establishing factories that could engage the jobless youths.

"Let me use this medium to advise politicians in Kwara State and those residing outside that politics is a game of choice; you don’t force people, you don't intimidate people and instead of coming occasionally to Ilorin to distribute money to youths that are jobless, I will expect them to set up cottage industries, factories, where these teeming youths could sustain a living and be gainfully employed. Let them use the money to empower their people, not dole it out occasionally when they are in Ilorin and youths would be shouting your names here and there; that is not the politics Nigerians want," he said.

Meanwhile, the ruling APC and the opposition PDP have accused one another of being behind the fracas.

The parties continued their vituperations yesterday as the APC called for the arrest of the PDP chairman, Chief Iyiola Oyedepo "to stem the tide of political violence in the state".

Spokesman of the party, Alhaji Sulyman Buhari, in a statement said "it is worrisome that the PDP has a penchant for violence and also painful that the PDP has been engaging in outright lies to confuse Kwarans about how Mr Eba was murdered".

But the PDP in a statement by its spokesman, Chief Rex Olawoye, described APC leaders as "purveyors" of death who should be arrested.

"This harvest of deaths of poor people, including the latest, where unarmed decampees were attacked by thugs sponsored by the leadership of the APC, which apparently considered the defection of former APC members to PDP as a sacrilege, stains the hands of the APC. And the earlier the leadership of the Kwara APC comes to terms with the fact that the delusion of grandeur that drives their politics is no longer sustainable, the better for them," it said.