Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov is to appear in court Sunday after being arrested at a Paris airport for offences related to his popular messaging app, sources told AFP.
Durov had arrived from Baku, Azerbaijan, a source close to the case said.
France’s OFMIN, an office tasked with preventing violence against minors, had issued an arrest warrant for Durov in a preliminary investigation into alleged offences including fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organised crime and promotion of terrorism, one source said.
The investigation is reportedly about a lack of moderation, with Durov accused of failing to take steps to curb criminal uses of Telegram. “Enough of Telegram’s impunity,” said one investigator who expressed surprise that Durov flew to Paris knowing he was a wanted man.
Durov’s lawyer, Dmitry Agranovsky, called the charges against his client “absolutely ridiculous,” telling Russian news agency RIA Novosti:
The Telegram messenger reportedly has about a billion users. And there you can find a message for any taste and colour, on any topic – from the Moon program to the flat Earth.
It’s the same as blaming a car manufacturer, some giant auto concern, for the fact that its cars are used for criminal purposes, or blaming them for an accident.
Following reports of Durov’s arrest, X platform owner Elon Musk commented: “It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme.”
Russia has accused France of “refusing to cooperate” following the arrest of the Franco-Russian billionaire, 39, at Le Bourget airport on Saturday night. Russian authorities said they had demanded access to Durov but had no response from France. “We immediately asked French authorities to explain the reasons for this detention and demanded that his rights be protected and that consular access be granted. Up to now, the French side is refusing to cooperate on this question,” Russia’s embassy in Paris said in a statement reported by the Ria Novosti news agency.
Telegram, based in Dubai, was founded by Durov, who left Russia in 2014 after he refused to comply with demands to shut down opposition communities on his VK social media platform, which he later sold.
Initially, Telegram was similar to other messaging apps, but has since diverged to become more of a social network in its own right. As well as communicating one-to-one, users can join groups of up to 200,000 people and create broadcast ‘channels’ that others can follow and leave comments on.
Elon Musk posted the hashtag #FreePavel on X and commented in French, “Liberte Liberte! Liberte?” (Freedom Freedom! Freedom?).
Former U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr said, also on X, that “the need to protect free speech has never been more urgent.”
The encrypted messaging app, based in Dubai, has positioned itself as an alternative to U.S.-owned platforms, which have been criticised for their commercial exploitation of users’ personal data. Telegram has committed to never disclosing information about its users.
In a rare interview, Durov told Tucker Carlson in April that he got the idea to launch an encrypted messaging app after coming under pressure from the Russian government while working at VK, a social network he created before selling it and leaving Russia in 2014.
He said he then tried to settle in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before choosing Dubai, which he praised for its business environment and “neutrality.”
People “love the independence. They also love the privacy, the freedom, (there are) a lot of reasons why somebody would switch to Telegram,” Durov told Carlson.
He said at the time that the platform had more than 900 million active users.
By basing itself in the United Arab Emirates, Telegram has shielded itself from moderation laws at a time when Western countries are pressuring large platforms to remove illegal content.
Telegram allows groups of up to 200,000 members, which has led to accusations that it makes it easier for false information to spread virally.
