Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is due to appear in a French court on Sunday after being arrested at a Paris airport on charges related to the popular messaging service, judicial sources told AFP.
Russia accused France of “refusing to cooperate” after French police arrested the 39-year-old Franco-Russian billionaire at Le Bourget airport, north of the capital, on Saturday evening.
A source close to the case said Durov had arrived from Baku, Azerbaijan.
France’s child violence prevention agency OFMIN had issued an arrest warrant for Durov as part of a preliminary investigation into several offences including fraud, drug trafficking, cyber-bullying, organised crime and promoting terrorism, one of the sources close to the case said.
Durov is suspected of failing to take action to prevent the use of the Telegram platform for criminal purposes.
“Enough of Telegram’s impunity,” said one investigator in the case, who noted that they were taken by surprise by Durov’s arrival in Paris, knowing that he was wanted.
France “refuses to cooperate”
Russian authorities said they had requested access to Durov but had received no response from France.
“We immediately asked the French authorities to explain the reasons for this arrest and demanded that his rights be protected and consular access granted. So far, the French side has refused to cooperate in this matter,” the Russian embassy in Paris said in a statement carried by the Ria Novosti news agency.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk, owner of the social network X, posted the hashtag #FreePavel (#PavelLibre) and commented in French “Liberté Liberté! Liberté?” (Freedom Freedom! Freedom?).
Telegram has positioned itself as an alternative to American messaging platforms, which have been criticised for their commercial exploitation of users’ personal data.
The encrypted messaging app has pledged to never reveal information about its users.
In an interview with right-wing US host Tucker Carlson in April, Durov said 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.
The entrepreneur, who set up the app’s headquarters in Dubai, praising the city’s “neutrality,” told Carlson that people “love independence. They also love privacy, freedom, there are many reasons why someone would switch to Telegram.”
Durov then claimed that the messaging app had more than 900 million active users.
Being based in the United Arab Emirates, Telegram has been shielded from moderation laws, amid pressure from Western countries on major platforms to remove illegal content.
Telegram allows groups of up to 200,000 members, prompting accusations that it facilitates the viral spread of false information, as well as users spreading neo-Nazi, pedophile, conspiracy and terrorist content.
Competing messaging service WhatsApp introduced global limits on message forwarding in 2019 after it was accused of allowing the spread of false information in India that led to lynchings.
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2024-08-27 21:03:45