The Kerala police have said athat the conspiracy to murder the two Youth Congress workers in Kasaragod was hatched at a reader's club near Periya.
Balaram Kumar Upadhyaya, IG, Kannur Range, told The Hindu that the police were also probing the money trail in the double homicide.
He said the functioning of certain quarries in the locality had been a subject of violent disagreement between the accused and the victims for long and the matter was also a subject of investigation.
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Mr. Upadhyaya said the preliminary forensic investigation report indicated that the hilt of the sharp-edged weapon recovered from the scene of the crime matched the sword blade the police had recovered from an abandoned well nearby on Tuesday.
Congress workers Sarath Lal and Kripesh were the first and sixth accused respectively in a case relating to an attempt to murder CPM local committee member A. Peethambaran on January 5.
The attack on Peethambaran, an influential and senior person in the rural locality, by two relatively young men had incensed his friends and party workers.
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Investigators said the accused, including the five persons arrested on Thursday, had met several times at the reading club in a rural locality nearly a km away from Periya, to plot their retaliation. The members of the club were overwhelmingly Left Democratic Front (LDF) supporters.
They said of the six persons arrested till now, three, including Peethambaran, were active partners in the execution of the crime. They had decided the place for the ambush, procured the vehicles and weapons.
Two of them tailed the youths who were on their way home from a local temple and possibly communicated their impending arrival at the spot to the hit-team over mobile phone.
Officers said the contours of the crime were yet to emerge fully. They were verifying the allegations raised by the families of the victims. They have also roped in the Crime Branch to provide expertise and specialist resources.