One Direction star Liam Payne died of multiple traumatic injuries, a UK inquest into his death has heard.

The 31-year-old singer, who died in October after falling from the third-floor balcony of a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was confirmed to have died of “polytrauma”, the inquest opening heard.

The hearing, which Buckinghamshire Coroner’s Court said was held on 17 December, was told it may take “some time” to establish how Payne died.

The inquest into Payne’s death in the UK has been adjourned until a pre-inquest review on 6 November, the coroner’s court said.

Five people have been charged over Payne’s death at the Casa Sur Hotel on 16 October.

The hotel’s manager, a receptionist and a “representative” of Payne have been charged with negligent homicide (similar to manslaughter in UK law), Argentina’s National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor’s Office previously said in a statement.

They are hotel manager Gilda Martin, receptionist Esteban Grassi and Payne’s “representative” Roger Nores.

Two others, hotel employee Ezequiel Pereyra and waiter Braian Paiz, have been charged with supplying cocaine.

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Family and friends attended Payne’s funeral on 20 November, including his girlfriend Kate Cassidy and former partner Cheryl, with whom he had a son, Bear.

His One Direction bandmates, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik also attended the private ceremony.

Senior Coroner Crispin Butler said during the inquest hearing: “Whilst there are ongoing investigations in Argentina into the circumstances of Liam’s death, over which I have no legal jurisdiction, it is anticipated that procuring the relevant information to address particularly how Liam came by his death may take some time through the formal channel of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.”

It comes after the star’s final hours were recently detailed by a judge and the Argentinian Public Prosecutor’s Office, who said in a statement Payne had been “demanding” drugs and alcohol during his stay at the hotel.

On 16 October, Payne was in the hotel lobby and “unable to stand” due to the “consumption of various substances”, the court document said.

The receptionist and two others “dragged” the singer to his room.

The document also reiterated the hypothesis that Payne had “tried to leave the room through the balcony and thus fell”.

So can you stop people smugglers by lumbering them with sanctions? That is the government’s latest idea, and it is bold and innovative.

It will certainly get attention, even if that doesn’t mean it will work. But it is another effort by this government to differentiate itself from the leaders who came before.

In a nutshell, the idea is to cut the financing to what the Foreign Office refers to as “organised immigration networks” and is intended to deter “smugglers from profiting off the trafficking of innocent people”.

So far, so convincing. The rhetoric is good. The reality may be more difficult.

For one thing, and we await actual details of what’s going to be done, this raises an enormous question of how this can be accomplished.

Some of the people smugglers bringing people across the Channel are based in Britain, but most aren’t. And as a general rule, they’re quite hard to track down.

I know that, because I’ve met some of them.

In Kurdistan, I drank tea with a cheerful man, Karwan, who had been responsible for smuggling a thousand people into Europe.

He had absolutely no fear of being caught, and no sense that he was even breaking the law.

Instead, Karwan considered that he was doing a duty to Kurds, allowing them to escape from the hardship of their nation to a more prosperous life in other countries, including Britain. Or, at least, that’s what he said.

How exactly Britain could impose sanctions on him is hard to imagine.

Nor is it hard to think of fear now creeping into the minds of the various smugglers I’ve met during years of reporting from the beaches of northern France.

These people are well aware that they’re breaking the law. You can hardly spend your time dodging French police and claim to be innocent.

Guns are becoming more commonplace in migrant camps. The spectre of sanctions won’t stop them.

So the question is whether the British government can track down the people at the very top of these organisations and find a way of levying financial sanctions that bite.

Presumably, if these people were in Britain, they’d be arrested, with the prospect of their assets being frozen.

So imposing sanctions will probably involve working alongside European countries, coordinating action and sharing information. A process that has become more complicated since Brexit.

Sanctions have previously worked well when targeted towards high-profile people and organisations with a clear track record.

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The oligarchs who have propped up Vladimir Putin’s regime, for instance, or companies trying to procure armaments for hostile states. All have been targeted by a coalition of nations.

But this idea is novel – unilateral for a start, even if, one assumes, the French, Germans, Belgians and others have been warned in advance.

It’s also not quite clear how it will work – organised crime is famously flexible and if you successfully sanction one person, then someone else is likely to take over.

As for levying sanctions on the smuggling leaders in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Albania and beyond – well, good luck.

What it does is to draw that distinction between the recent past, when the Rwanda plan was the main ambition, and Keir Starmer’s reliance on focusing on criminality and working together with partners.

And one other note. For years, the government has talked about people crossing the Channel as illegal migrants, even though there is a dispute between UK and international law about whether these people are actually breaking the law.

Now the Foreign Office is using the term “irregular migration”. Is this a change of tone, or just a stylistic whim? Just as with the sanctions, we will wait and see.

A senior Conservative has called for a retrial for Lucy Letby, the nurse jailed for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others.

Former minister Sir David Davis has said he believes a retrial will “clear” her, as her conviction was “built on a poor understanding of probabilities” and lacked “hard evidence”.

He told MPs on Wednesday “there is case in justice” for a retrial, but admitted there was a problem.

Much of the expert analysis of the case notes he was referring to, was available at the time but not presented to the jury, he said.

That meant the Court of Appeal can dismiss it, “basically saying the defence should have presented it at the initial trial”.

In effect, he said, the court can say: “‘If your defence team weren’t good enough to present this evidence, hard luck you stay banged up for life’.”

Such an outcome “may be judicially convenient, but it’s not justice,” he said.

He said earlier: “There was no hard evidence against Letby, nobody saw her do anything untoward. The doctor’s gut feeling was based on a coincidence – she was on shift for a number of deaths, and this is important, although far from all of them, far from all of them.

“It was built on a poor understanding of probabilities, which could translate later into an influential but spectacularly flawed piece of evidence.”

Sir David said Letby’s case “horrified the nation” and that it “seemed clear a nurse had turned into a serial killer”.

“Now I initially accepted the tabloid characterisation of Letby as an evil monster, but then I was approached by many experts, leading statisticians, neonatal specialists, forensic scientists, legal experts and those who had served at Chester Hospital who were afraid to come forward,” he added.

These experts convinced Sir David that “false analyses and diagnoses” had been used to “persuade a lay jury” to find Letby guilty.

Responding to Sir David, Justice Minister Alex Davies-Jones said it is “an important principle of the rule of law that the Government does not interfere with judicial decisions”.

She added: “It is not appropriate for me or the government to comment on judicial processes nor the reliability of convictions or evidence.”

Ms Davies-Jones later told the Commons that Letby could apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission if she believed she had been wrongly convicted.

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Letby, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted at Manchester Crown Court of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims, between June 2015 and June 2016.

Letby, who was in her mid-20s and working at the Countess of Chester Hospital at the time of the murders, is now the UK’s most prolific child killer of modern times.

The 33-year-old killed her victims by injecting the infants with insulin or air or force-feeding them with milk.