A young man accused of providing former One Direction star Liam Payne with the drugs he consumed in the run-up to his death has disputed the charges. Instead, he insists that he met the star through his waitering job and went on to have an “intimate” encounter with him.

“The truth is that I didn’t provide him with drugs,” said Braian Paiz during a television interview with the Argentine channel Telefe.

On Thursday, Argentina’s public prosecutor announced charges against three people over Payne’s death. One of the singer’s travel companions stands accused of abandonment of a person, a form of criminal negligence charge in Argentina. The other two — a hotel worker and a third person, apparently Paiz — are accused of procuring him the drugs he took in the run-up to his death.

Paiz said that he met Payne at the restaurant where he worked on October 2. The pop star seemed to have taken drugs that night, he said, and didn’t eat anything. “At one point, he came to me and asked for my contact details,” Paiz said. “I gave him my Instagram, and then he sent me messages, because he wanted to do drugs, I think he was going to a concert or something.” 

October 2 is the night that Payne attended his former One Direction bandmate Niall Horan’s concert in Buenos Aires.

That night, Paiz said he went to the Hyatt, the first hotel where Payne stayed. The star picked him up downstairs. 

“We got together there and he showed me some of his music, the music he was going to release later,” he said. The pair chatted and drank a shot of whisky together, according to Paiz. A photo shows Paiz smiling into the camera with Payne, who is wearing a white New York cap, a white jacket and T shirt. 

‘Something intimate happened’

Payne and Paiz stayed in contact via social media, with Payne using a fake Instagram profile, according to Paiz. Then, the two met up again on the night of Sunday, October 13, this time at the Casa Sur hotel. Paiz claims he spent the night there, smoking cannabis while Payne did cocaine. “We took drugs, that’s the truth. Something intimate happened there,” he said. 

He added that Payne appeared to be attempting to separate out or “clean” the cocaine before smoking it.

Paiz is at times incoherent and appears to contradict himself during the interview. He said that Payne “seemed fine” the second time they saw each other, adding: “At no point was he aggressive, he was really sweet, he was asking if I was OK.” He added that he did not think Payne had died by suicide. 

However, he then claimed that Payne was “frightened” when he left and stuffed the slot of the hotel room’s key card reader with paper, as if to hold the door open.

Prosecutor Andres Madrea announced on Thursday that all of Payne’s injuries were compatible with a fall and ruled out the possibility that a third party was involved.

According to the Telefe interviewer, Payne went to Paiz’s restaurant with three other people including his girlfriend, but it is not clear where those individuals were during the first encounter that Payne and Paiz allegedly had that night.

‘We did drugs together’

When the interviewer asks Paiz outright whether he provided Payne with drugs, he replies: “We did drugs together. That’s the truth. I didn’t bring him anything, I didn’t accept money from him. There are messages from him where he always wanted to pay, he was used to that, I don’t know, I never accepted anything at all from him.”

As Paiz was leaving, he claims Payne offered him clothes to remember him by, but he refused. 

After that, he said, Payne went to his house, entering and going half way up the stairs. Paiz said he was unsure how Payne had got in. “He wanted us to go back to the hotel,” Paiz said. “I told him that I couldn’t, that I had to work, it was a few minutes before I had to go to work […] I said, ‘I can’t,’ and he said, ‘Well, it’s been a pleasure,’ and that’s the last time I saw him.”

Asked whether he recognized the scenes from Payne’s room that appeared in photos published by the police after his death, Paiz said that he recognized the room, but the drugs were not there when he saw it. The Dove soap box and the candle were there, but Paiz says he did not know what they were for. 

The former One Direction star died on October 16 at age 31 after falling from a third-floor balcony onto a patio at the CasaSur hotel on Costa Rica Street in Palermo. He was killed instantly. Police confirmed his death shortly after 6 p.m.

Contrary to anonymous reports saying that Payne had consumed “pink cocaine” before dying, results of toxicology tests revealed that in the moments before his death and within his last 72 hours, Payne only had traces of alcohol, cocaine and a prescription antidepressant in his body.