Telegram boss Pavel Durov must appear in court after French arrest

According to sources, Telegram boss Pavel Durov will appear in court on Sunday after being arrested at Paris airport on charges related to his popular messaging app.

Russia has accused France of refusing to cooperate after the 39-year-old French-Russian billionaire was arrested at Le Bourget airport on Saturday evening.

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

A source said 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 fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime and promoting terrorism, among other charges.

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

“End the impunity at Telegram,” said one investigator, expressing surprise that Durov flew to Paris despite knowing he was a wanted man.

“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.

Businessman Elon Musk, who owns the social media platform X, posted 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.”

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.