Three weeks after Liam Payne‘s death, prosecutors in Argentina have ruled out suicide as a cause and charged three people.
The One Direction alum’s autopsy showed that his injuries were neither the cause of self-harm or physical intervention by others after he died of multiple injuries and external building when he fell from the third-floor balcony of his Buenos Aires hotel room on Wednesday, Oct. 16 at age 31.
After La Nación reported that Hotel Casa Sur staff called police before the incident to report “an aggressive man that could’ve been under the influence of drugs or alcohol,” a toxicology report found multiple drugs in his system at the time of death.
The three suspects, who were not identified, were charged with “abandonment of a person followed by death, supply and facilitating the use of narcotics.” A judge has prohibited the trio from leaving the country, but no one has been arrested.
One of the suspects was someone close to Payne who possibly worked with him, one was a hotel employee, and the other provided drugs to the singer.
Born Aug. 29, 1993 in Wolverhampton, England, Payne first auditioned for The X Factor at age 14 in 2008, singing Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Although he was cut, Cowell encouraged him to come back two years later.
In 2010, Payne returned to the competition series and was grouped with Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik to form One Direction. Following their time on the show, the group was signed to Simon Cowell‘s Syco Entertainment.
From 2010 to 2016, the group released five albums and became a global sensation, winning seven Brit Awards and selling more than 70 million albums worldwide.
After the group went their separate ways, Payne released his lone solo album LP1 in 2019.