Liam Payne death investigation: 3 charged in connection with Liam Payne’s death, self-harm ruled out as cause of death

Three people have been charged with ‘crimes involving abandonment followed by death, supplying and facilitating narcotics’, in connection with the death of former One direction singer Liam Payne last month, the Argentine Public Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement on Thursday.

The three people charged in connection with Payne’s death include an individual who accompanied Payne “daily during his stay in the city of Buenos Aires.” This person was charged with “crimes involving abandonment followed by death,” a charge that carries a prison sentence of five to 15 years, prosecutors said.

The other two people charged are each charged with “the crime of drug delivery,” prosecutors said. They include a hotel employee believed to have provided Payne with two stashes of cocaine while he was staying at the hotel, and a drug supplier accused of supplying Payne with drugs at “two different times on October 14,” the prosecutor’s office said.

According to Argentine State Police, Payne died on October 16 after falling from his third-floor hotel room in Palermo, Buenos Aires. He was 31 years old.

Payne’s father, Geoff Payne, left Buenos Aires with his son’s body on Wednesday, bound for Britain. He had been in the country for weeks waiting for authorities to allow him to return to Britain with Payne’s body once the criminal investigation was completed.

The investigation into Payne’s death found that he was “not fully conscious or experiencing a state of noticeable decline or loss of consciousness at the time of the fall”, leading the prosecution to rule out “self-harm of any kind”.

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“For the prosecutor, this situation would also rule out the possibility of a conscious or voluntary act by the victim, since in the state he was in he did not know what he was doing and could not understand it.” said the prosecutor’s office.

“In the moments before his death and during the period of at least his last 72 hours, Payne had only traces of polydrug use of alcohol, cocaine and a prescription antidepressant in his system,” the results of the toxicology tests showed, the prosecutor’s office said . said.

“All injuries suffered by Payne were compatible with those caused by a fall from a height and excluded self-harm of any kind and/or physical intervention by third parties,” the prosecutor’s office said.

Police raid hotel workers’ homes following the death of Liam Payne

The news comes after two officers close to the investigation confirmed to ABC News that police had raided the homes of hotel employees and a friend of Payne.

A total of nine raids were carried out, with police seizing mobile phones, a hard drive, three laptops and drugs including marijuana, the prosecutor’s office said.

Last week, multiple sources with direct knowledge of the investigation told ABC News police that they had reviewed surveillance footage that appeared to show multiple drug exchanges between a dealer and a hotel employee before Payne’s death. Sources said at the time that police are investigating whether the hotel employee supplied Payne with drugs.

Previously, sources told ABC News that a partial autopsy also showed he had multiple substances in his system that day, including “pink cocaine” — a recreational drug that is typically a mix of several drugs, including methamphetamine, ketamine, MDMA and others – – as well as cocaine, benzodiazepine and crack. According to the sources, a makeshift aluminum pipe for taking drugs was also found in his hotel room.

A preliminary autopsy report from Argentina’s public prosecutor’s office showed on October 17 that Payne died of “multiple trauma” and “internal and external bleeding.”

Twenty-five injuries were reported on Payne’s body. The report stated that Payne’s head injury was sufficient to cause death and that the cause of death was related to the height of his fall.