One Direction star Liam Payne has died after falling in Argentina

Liam Payne, a former member of the boy band One Direction, was found dead in a hotel courtyard in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Wednesday evening, according to CNN La NacionBoth cited local police.

The singer died after an apparent fall from the balcony of his third-floor hotel room. Argentine authorities told Good Morning America that Payne was staying at the Hotel CasaSur in the upscale neighborhood of Palermo.

He was 31.

Witnesses told TMZ that Payne was acting erratically in the hotel lobby on Wednesday. After his laptop broke, he had to be carried back to his room, the tabloid reported.

A spokesman for the Buenos Aires city security department told the Associated Press in a statement that Payne “threw himself from the balcony of his room.”

An official cause of death was not immediately confirmed, pending an autopsy and investigation.

Alberto Crescenti, the head of Bueno Aires’ public emergency service, said in a brief televised statement that Payne appeared to have suffered a fracture at the base of his skull after falling from 13 to 14 meters.

Crescenti declined to answer further questions about the incident, including whether the fall was intentional or accidental.

Hours before news of his death broke, Payne had posted a flurry of photos and videos to his Snapchat story. The posts were quickly deleted — it was unclear by whom — but not before they were archived and shared online by his followers.

At least one photo showed him posing with his girlfriend Kate Cassidy, who accompanied him last week when he flew to Argentina to attend a concert by his former bandmate Niall Horan.

Payne’s appearance on the October 2 show, where he was filmed clapping and dancing to the music, caused quite a stir online. In a Snapchat video posted before his flight, Payne said he was flying to Argentina to “say hello.”

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“It’s been a while since me and Niall have spoken,” he said in an archived version of the clip. “We have a lot to discuss. And I’d like to clear a few things up with the boy. No bad vibes or anything like that. But we just have to talk.”

Payne and Horan formed One Direction in 2010 alongside bandmates Harry Styles, Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson. The five were put together by judge Simon Cowell after auditioning separately for the band The X Factor.

The young boy band joined forces to compete as a group and ultimately took third place. They were signed to Cowell’s entertainment label and gained worldwide fame the following year after the release of their first single, “What Makes You Beautiful.”

Payne first applied for the British reality show in 2008 at the age of 14, singing a cover of Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon”, but it didn’t get him past the first round. When he returned two years later, it was Payne’s version of Michael Bublé’s “Cry Me a River” that won him a spot in One Direction.

“He wasn’t quite ready… two years ago, but I had said to him then, ‘Come back in two years and you’ll be a different person,'” Cowell admitted Payne received a standing ovation, said his fellow judges. “I got it right.”

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One Direction became one of the best-selling boy bands of all time with their first four albums in 2011 Up all night2012s Take me home2013 Midnight memoriesand 2014 Four— all debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

The band went on an indefinite hiatus in 2016, a few months after Malik left the group to pursue a career as a solo artist. His former bandmates all eventually followed suit. Payne, for his part, debuted in 2017 with “Strip That Down,” a barebones synthesizer bass track written for him by Ed Sheeran.

“To be honest, I didn’t plan on starting a solo business. I just wanted to start songwriting and keep going and do that,” Payne told Billboard at the time.

“But then I thought, ‘You’ve been trying to do this since you were 14 years old.’ “It would be ridiculously stupid to turn down the option of a deal.” When we left the band we had some pretty good options. I had to do something.”

This is a recent story and will be updated.