Three people have been charged with “offences of abandoning a person followed by death, supplying and facilitating narcotics” in connection with the death of former One Direction singer Liam Payne last month, the Argentine Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement on Thursday.

The three people charged in connection with Payne’s death include a person who accompanied Payne “daily during his stay in the city of Buenos Aires.” That person was charged with “criminal abandonment of a person, followed by death,” a charge that carries a potential sentence of 5 to 15 years in prison, prosecutors said.

The other two defendants each face “felony supply of narcotics” charges, prosecutors said. They include a hotel employee who is believed to have supplied Payne with two supplies of cocaine while he was staying at the hotel and a drug supplier accused of supplying Payne with drug supplies at “two different times on October 14 ”, according to the data. the prosecutor’s office.

Payne died on October 16 after falling from his third-floor hotel room in Palermo, Buenos Aires, according to Argentina’s state police. He was 31 years old.

Payne’s father, Geoff Payne, left Buenos Aires on Wednesday with his son’s body, heading for the United Kingdom. He had been in the country for weeks waiting for authorities to allow him to return to the UK with Payne’s body once the criminal investigation had concluded.

The inquest into Payne’s death found that he was “not fully conscious or in a state of apparent diminution 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 prosecution, this situation would also exclude the possibility of a conscious or voluntary act on the part of the victim, since, in the state in which he was, he did not know what he was doing, nor could he understand it.” said the prosecutor’s office.

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

“All of Payne’s injuries were consistent with a fall from a height and self-inflicted injury of any kind and/or third-party physical intervention were excluded,” the prosecutor’s office said.

Police raided the homes of hotel staff after Liam Payne’s death

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

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

Last week, multiple sources with direct knowledge of the investigation told ABC News that police were reviewing CCTV footage that appeared to show several drug exchanges between a dealer and a hotel employee that took place before Payne’s death. Sources at the time said police were investigating whether the hotel employee supplied Payne with drugs.

Earlier, sources told ABC News that a partial autopsy also found that he had several substances in his system that day, including “pink cocaine” — a recreational drug that is usually a mixture of several drugs, including methamphetamine, ketamine, MDMA and others – – as well as cocaine, benzodiazepines and crack. A makeshift aluminum pipe for ingesting drugs was also found in his hotel room, sources said.

A preliminary autopsy report by the Argentine Prosecutor’s Office revealed on October 17 that Payne died of “multiple trauma” and “internal and external bleeding”.

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