POLICE shot two brothers dead in Spanish Town yesterday in a wave of violence that has cost five lives and left at least nine persons injured in the old capital since Sunday.

Members of Reneto Adams’ Crime Management Unit (CMU) shot and killed brothers, Andrew Hamilton, 26, and Anief Jagaroo, 20, — called Dog and Cat, respectively — in what the police insisted was a gunbattle but some residents of the Windsor Road area of the town claimed to have been murder.

At the very least, argued some people, Hamilton and Jagaroo — who the police accuse of involvement in a drive-by shooting at a dance Sunday night, in which one person was killed and nine injured — might have been captured alive.

“You couldn’t carry them? You couldn’t carry them in?,” Barry Jagaroo, an uncle of the slain men, asked the police after yesterday’s incident.

But the police said that Hamilton and Jagaroo opened fire on a party trying to apprehend them and were, in turn, shot dead.

There were suggestions of political overtones to the St Catherine violence, but last night politicians warned against a rush to judgment.

“I have to maintain a responsible position and allow the police to investigate,” said Central St Catherine MP, Olivia “Babsy” Grange. “I don’t want to say anything to inflate the situation because the area is already tense.”

Orville Cephas, 56, one of two men shot dead at Cumberland and Wellington streets on Sunday, was apparently wearing a Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) T-shirt with Grange’s image. He had only minutes before his death completed the cleaning of her constituency office, Grange said.

The other man killed in that incident was Trevor Reid, who, like, Cephas, received several gunshot wounds.

Two armed men carried out those killings.

Near mid-night Sunday, there was what police believe to have been a reprisal shooting at a dance at Riverside Inn, a club at Dam Head in St Catherine, owned by ruling People’s National Party Central St Catherine constituency caretaker, Homer White.

According to witnesses, a white Toyota Corolla drove by and stopped at the club. Several men came out of the car, pulled guns and opened fire on people attending the open-air dance.

At the end of the shooting, Edwin Willis, 30, of Dam Head, was dead. Nine other persons, including four women, were injured.

Yesterday, the Spanish Town police and CMU members were operating in the Windsor Road area when they came across the car believed to have been used in Friday night’s shooting.

Not long afterwards, five men, who the police suspected of being the shooters, were spotted and challenged.

According to the police, the response of the men was to open fire and then run in several directions.

A further exchange of fire between the police and two of the men led to the deaths of Hamilton and Jageroo, the police said.

A .38 Smith and Wesson revolver with six live bullets was taken from the bodies, the police said.

“These two men are reported to have been involved in a lot of criminal activities in this area, March Pen Road and Spanish Town in the last nine months,” Adams said yesterday. “This is the fourth time we are coming in search of them and we have been unable to, on the last three occasions, apprehend them.”