The former manager of Venezuelan rapper Canserbero has confessed to killing him in a video statement released by Venezuela’s attorney-general.
The death in 2015 of Canserbero, who had been named best rapper in Spanish by Rolling Stone magazine, had originally been ruled a suicide.
Ex-manager Natalia Améstica said she had drugged the rapper and stabbed him.
With the help of her brother, she then threw the rapper’s body from a 10th-story window, she said.
The death of the 26-year-old rapper, whose real name is Tyrone González, had shocked his fans, especially because it was ruled at the time that the star had killed his friend Carlos Molnar in a knife fight before jumping from a window.
His family and friends always doubted the official version of events and the case was reopened last month after much pressure from them.
On Tuesday, Venezuelan Attorney-General Tarek William Saab released video statements recorded on 19 December by Natalia and her brother Guillermo, in which the two recounted what had happened on the night Canserbero was killed.
Natalia Améstica claims that she had become enraged during a tour of the rapper to Chile, when the rapper’s friend and producer, Carlos Molnar, had told her that she would not be reimbursed for plane tickets she had bought, nor receive a share of the profits of the tour, which she claims she had organised.
Améstica and Carlos Molnar, 35, were a couple and had reportedly been in a relationship for more than 10 years.
She also says that she learned during the tour that Canserbero no longer wanted her as his manager.
“This hurt me a lot and left me with a lot of internal pain,” she says sitting in a chair looking at the camera.
She recalls how on the night of 19 January 2015, Canserbero and Molnar came to her apartment in the Venezuelan city of Maracay.
“The kids had left to stay with their grandmother and the chance arose to make them a tea,” she says calmly.
Améstica says she spiked the tea with a powerful tranquiliser.
When her drugged partner Carlos Molnar entered the kitchen, where she was cooking dinner, she stabbed him in the neck, in the back and in the arm.
“Tyrone saw me and was very worried, but he was also sleepy. I explained that it was an attack of rage, that I hadn’t been able to control myself,” she recalls.
“He [Canserbero] collapsed on the sofa asleep and I stabbed him twice in the side. In desperation, I then called my brother Guillermo to help me resolve the situation.”
Améstica says that her brother arrived with three officers from Venezuela’s intelligence agency, Sebin.
“They finished arranging the scene in a way to make it look like a murder-suicide, meaning that they stabbed Carlos a few more times, my brother Guillermo stabbed him four times. The rest, the Sebin officials did,” she explains.
Améstica describes how her brother beat Tyrone’s face to make it look like he was involved in a fight.
“Then we were told how to throw him out of the window to complete the murder-suicide scene,” she says.
Her brother Guillermo backs up her account of the evening in a video statement which has also been released by the attorney-general’s office.
“We lifted the body between the two of us and threw it,” he says of the moment he and his sister made it look like the rapper had jumped from a window.
He alleges that forensic detectives quickly remarked on the fact that the crime scene appeared “manipulated”.
“They told me: ‘If you want us to collaborate, it’ll cost you $10,000 (£7,850).'”
“Given the circumstances, I agreed,” he says, describing how the officials from forensic service helped him and his sister tamper with the crime scene.
Venezuela’s Attorney-General Tarek William Saab said that arrest warrants had been issued for several of the Sebin officers who were at the scene, as well as for a forensic pathologist and two investigators with the prosecutor’s office involved in the subsequent investigation.
He added that six people were already in custody, with more being sought.