Telegram boss Pavel Durov arrested at French airport

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According to sources, Telegram boss Pavel Durov is due to appear in court on Sunday after being arrested by French police at an airport near Paris for alleged crimes related to his popular messaging app.

The 39-year-old French-Russian billionaire was arrested on Saturday evening at Le Bourget airport north of the French capital, said one of the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Durov arrived from Baku in Azerbaijan, another source familiar with the case said.

France's OFMIN, an agency tasked with preventing violence against minors, has issued an arrest warrant for Durov as part of a preliminary investigation into suspected crimes including fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime and promoting terrorism, one of the sources said.

Durov is accused of not taking measures to curb the criminal use of his platform.

“End impunity at Telegram,” said one of the investigators, adding that they were surprised that Durov came to Paris knowing that he was a wanted man.

The 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, a social network he founded before selling it and leaving Russia in 2014.

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.