For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails
Pavel Durov, the Russian-French billionaire founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV and BFM TV said, citing unidentified sources.
Mr Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.
TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.
Mr Durov faces possible indictment on Sunday, according to French media.
The encrypted Telegram, with close to one billion users, is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.
Telegram did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The French interior ministry and police had no comment.
Mr Durov founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.
“I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone,” Mr Durov told American journalist Tucker Carlson in April about his exit from Russia and search for a home for his company which included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.
After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram has become the main source of unfiltered, and sometimes graphic and misleading, content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.
The platform has become what some analysts call ”a virtual battlefield” for the war, used heavily by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his officials, as well as the Russian government.
The Russian foreign ministry said its embassy in Paris was clarifying the situation around Mr Durov and called on Western NGOs to demand his release.
Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order to grant state security services access to encrypted messages of its users.
The action interrupted many third-party services, but had little effect on the availability of Telegram there. The ban order, however, sparked mass protests in Moscow and criticism from NGOs.
TF1 said Mr Durov, who is now based in Dubai, had been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8pm local time.
Mr Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said some governments had sought to pressure him but the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.
Telegram’s increasing popularity, however, has prompted scrutiny from several countries in Europe, including France, on security and data breach concerns.
Russia’s representative to international organisations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, and several other Russian politicians were quick on Sunday to accuse France of acting as a dictatorship – the same criticism that Moscow faced when putting demands on Mr Durov in 2014 and trying to ban Telegram in 2018.
“Some naive persons still don’t understand that if they play more or less visible role in international information space it is not safe for them to visit countries which move towards much more totalitarian societies,” Mr Ulyanov wrote on X.
Elon Musk, billionaire owner of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, said after reports of Mr Durov’s detention: “It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme.”
Robert F Kennedy Jr, who on Friday abandoned his US presidential campaign and endorsed Republican Donald Trump, said on X after the reports that the need to protect free speech “has never been more urgent.”
Several Russian bloggers called for protests at French embassies throughout the world at noon on Sunday.
