A nurse at the private Athens Stem Cell clinic where Greek singer Giorgos Mazonakis died has told investigators that its defibrillator failed to work because it had not been charged.

The 56-year-old gave evidence to the 42nd regular investigating magistrate, who is leading the inquiry into the singer’s death during a plasmapheresis session at the practice on Karneadou Street in the upmarket Kolonaki district. Plasmapheresis is a procedure in which plasma is separated from the blood and removed from the body.

Mazonakis died on 9 September, aged 54. The husband-and-wife doctors who ran the clinic, Ioanna Gaka and Ilias Theodoropoulos, have been remanded in custody on charges of intentional homicide with possible intent by omission, which they deny.

In her testimony, the nurse described two phone calls made from the clinic shortly after 4pm. “Up until 4pm, everything was fine,” she said.

The first call, made between 4pm and 4.10pm, was to an anaesthetist. The second followed immediately and was to the man who had supplied the defibrillator. “We asked him why it wasn’t working, and he explained that it should have been charged,” she said.

Digital records from the plasmapheresis machine reportedly show the procedure began at 2.14pm, while the call to Greece’s National Emergency Aid Centre (EKAB) has been placed at around 4.21pm. Investigators are trying to establish what happened in the intervening period.

Her testimony, along with that of hypnotherapist Nasos Komianos, sheds new light on the events leading up to the singer’s visit to the clinic and on what took place there on the day he died.

The arrival time

The nurse also addressed her original statement, in which she had given a different time for the singer’s arrival at the clinic. She told the magistrate she had said Mazonakis arrived at 3.30pm because that was what the doctor had instructed staff to say.

“I said in my first statement that Mazonakis came to the clinic at 3.30pm because that was the line the doctor gave us,” she said. “I got to the clinic at 3pm. I didn’t know what time the singer had arrived; he was already inside when I got there.”

She said she had not known that the clinic’s equipment was illegal, nor that any particular protocol had to be followed, as all instructions came from the doctor.

“I had no idea the machines at the clinic were illegal. How am I supposed to know whether something is legal or not?” she said. “We didn’t know there was a protocol to follow. The doctor was always the one giving instructions and I had no idea about any of what went on. We thought everything was legal.”

The hypnotherapist’s account

Komianos gave evidence to the same magistrate on the morning of Monday 21 September, describing how he came to be in contact with Mazonakis. Gaka is alleged to have sent him photographs of the singer taken during the treatment.

He said the first approach came from the singer’s manager, who phoned him at 11.02am on 27 August. “She told me to meet Giorgos Mazonakis so he could have hypnotherapy,” he said. He added that he initially refused to take the singer on because of his history of treatment at Dromokaiteio, the psychiatric hospital in western Athens.

According to his testimony, the manager called again at around 1.30pm the same day and pressed for a meeting. She rang once more at around 1pm on 2 September to arrange an appointment with the singer.

Komianos said he agreed, and the meeting was first set for Tuesday 8 September before being brought forward to Monday 7 September. It took place at 5pm that day at a restaurant in Psychiko, a northern suburb of Athens.

He told the magistrate he understood that after the meeting the doctor contacted Mazonakis, and that the two agreed on the fee and the course of treatment, with the doctor sending the singer details of what she planned to do.

Komianos also described a message he sent the doctor on the Tuesday morning, ahead of his own appointment with the singer the following afternoon. “I wrote to her, ‘I’ll pin him down’,” he said, explaining that he was referring to his Wednesday session.