Telegram’s Russian-born founder and chief executive, Pavel Durov, was in French police custody on Sunday awaiting a court hearing after being arrested at Paris airport on suspected offenses related to the popular but controversial messaging app.
His arrest late Saturday at Le Bourget airport outside Paris is the latest extraordinary twist in the career of one of the world’s most influential tech icons, who is not yet 40 years old.
The pre-trial detention of 39-year-old Durov could be extended beyond the night from Sunday to Sunday by the investigating judge handling the case.
After this initial period of detention, the judge may decide whether to release the accused or to bring charges and then remand him in custody.
Russia has accused France of “refusing to cooperate,” and fellow technologist Elon Musk rushed to its defense after the billionaire’s arrest. Durov holds a French passport among other nationalities.
Durov had arrived from Baku, Azerbaijan, and planned to have dinner in the French capital, a source familiar with the case said.
He was accompanied by a bodyguard and a personal assistant who accompanied him at all times, the source added, asking to remain anonymous.
Another source reported that France’s OFMIN, an agency charged with preventing violence against minors, issued an arrest warrant for Durov as part of a preliminary investigation. He is accused of alleged crimes including fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime and promoting terrorism.
Durov is accused of not taking measures to curb the criminal use of his platform.
He founded Telegram in 2013 after his first project, the Russian social network VKontakte, ran into ownership difficulties, for which he blamed the Kremlin.
One of the reasons why Telegram is so popular is because it is easy to watch and post videos on its messaging “channels”.
However, critics accuse the portal of frequently hosting illegal content, ranging from extremely sexual depictions and misinformation to services for purchasing drugs.
– “Refusal to cooperate” –
Russian authorities said they had requested access to Durov but received no response from France.
“We immediately asked the French authorities to explain the reasons for this detention and demanded that his rights be protected and consular access granted. So far, the French side has refused to cooperate on this issue,” the Russian embassy in Paris said in a statement to the Ria Novosti news agency.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow had requested consular access, adding that since he also holds French citizenship, “France considers this his main nationality.”
Musk, who heads the car company Tesla and the social network X (formerly Twitter), posted on X the hashtag #FreePavel and commented in French: “Liberte Liberte! Liberte?” (Freedom, freedom! Freedom?).
Former U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also said on X that “the need to protect free speech has never been more urgent.”
US whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has applied for asylum in Russia, strongly condemned the allegations and spoke of “an attack on the basic human rights of freedom of expression and association”. He said he was saddened that Paris had “gone so far as to take hostages in order to gain access to private communications”.
– “Independence, privacy, freedom” –
A source familiar with the case expressed surprise that Durov had flown to France with an arrest warrant out for him. “Perhaps he felt he could get away with it,” the source said.
Le Bourget is now used by private aircraft rather than regular commercial traffic. It is also known as the place where Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev fled to the West in 1961.
Telegram, an encrypted messaging app based in Dubai, positions itself as an alternative to US platforms that have been criticized for their commercial exploitation of their users’ personal data.
Telegram is committed to never revealing information about its users.
In a rare interview with right-wing talk show host Tucker Carlson in April, Durov said he came up with the idea of launching an encrypted messaging app when he came under pressure from the Russian government while working at VK.
He then tried to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before settling on Dubai, which he praised for its business environment and “neutrality”.
People “love the independence. They also love the privacy, the freedom. There are many reasons why someone would switch to Telegram,” Durov told Carlson.
He said at the time that the platform had more than 900 million active users.
By being based in the United Arab Emirates, Telegram has been able to protect itself from moderation laws at a time when Western countries are pushing major platforms to remove illegal content.
Telegram allows groups of up to 200,000 members. As a result, the platform is accused of facilitating the viral spread of false information and the dissemination of neo-Nazi, pedophile, conspiracy theory and terrorist content.
Rival messaging service WhatsApp introduced global restrictions on message forwarding in 2019 after being accused of facilitating the spread of false information in India that led to lynchings.
bur-jh-sjw/yad
