Hip-hop star Afrika Bambaataa has died aged 68, the Hip Hop Alliance has confirmed. They issued a statement to praise him for helping shape a "global movement rooted in peace, unity, love, and having fun as they paid tribute to his role in hip-hop as a genre and cultural force. TMZ, which reported on his death, said he died in Pennsylvania due to complications from cancer on Thursday (April 9).

He faced legal issues after accusations by several men of sexually abusing them as children during the 1980s and 1990s, he was forced to pay a settlement to a man who accused him of sex trafficking him in the 1990s, claiming he was sexually abused and trafficked by him for four years. The payout came as Bambaataa failed to show up to court so a default judgement was made.

In 2016, activist Ronald "Bee-Stinger" Savage accused him of molesting him when he was a child in 1980, eleven others followed to claim they were abused by Bambaataa. However, Savage later said: "In 2016 and beyond, I completely forgot that when I was younger, when I was 15, I had a fake ID that stated I was 18 to get into clubs.

"Bambaataa is not a paedophile, and in my eyes, he was engaging in something consensual with someone he believed was of age."

Bambaataa said to Fox 5 News in 2016: "I never abused nobody. You know, it just sounds crazy for people to say that, to hear: ‘You abused me.’

"You know all my people back then, you know the hundreds of people that been around me. If something like that happened, why you never went to none of them?"

As a teenager he became a member of the Black Spades gang and eventually forced the Universal Zulu Nation in a bid to move youth culture away from violence and towards creativity.

Bambaataa's 1982 hit Planet Rock won him global recognition which has since been credited with shaping hip-hop in the 1980s, his hop-hop vision transformed the Bronx borough into "the birthplace of a culture that now reaches every corner of the world", said Reverend Dr Kurtis Blow Walker, who is the executive director of Hip Hop Alliance.

Tributes have since poured in for the musician, with people referring to him as a "pioneer of hip-hop".