A Colombian rapper who went missing while on tour in Mexico has been found dead and identified by his family, Mexican prosecutors said Monday.
Rapper Byron Sanchez, who used the stage name B King, disappeared with Colombian DJ colleague Jorge Herrera on September 16 as they left a gym in an exclusive neighborhood of Mexico City, their manager told Colombian radio.
Mexico City prosecutors said that another body found on September 17 presented “similarities” with that of Herrera, who performed under the name Regio Clown.
His body had yet to be formally identified.
“They told me they were going to have lunch with two people, but didn’t return any messages thereafter,” the musicians’ manager, Juan Camilo Gallego, told Colombia’s Blu Radio.
He said he initially suspected that they had been kidnapped, but received no ransom demand and reported them missing to the authorities.
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum said earlier that the men’s disappearance was under investigation.
Reacting to reports of the two men’s deaths, Colombia’s leftist President Gustavo Petro wasted no time in claiming the pair had been “murdered.”
“They murdered our youth in the United States of Mexico,” Petro, a fierce critic of the US-led war on drugs, wrote on X, without naming the victims.
“More young people murdered by an anti-drug policy that is not an anti-drug trafficking policy,” he wrote.
Family members and friends of B King had posted images of the singer on social media with requests for help in finding him.
Petro had on Sunday asked for Sheinbaum’s help in finding the pair and speculated that their disappearance was linked to “multinational mafias.”
More than 120,000 people are listed as missing in Mexico, a country plagued by drug cartel violence.