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Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, French media reported.
Mr Durov, who arrived on a private jet, was arrested in connection with a French police investigation focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, TF1 TV and BFM TV said. Police considered that the lack of moderation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the app.
Mr Durov could possibly be indicted on Sunday.
Mr Durov founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia, where he was born, the following year after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.
“I would rather be free than take orders from anyone,” Mr Durov told American journalist Tucker Carlson in April about his exit from Russia and search for a home for his company that included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore, and San Francisco.
Mr Durov obtained French citizenhip in August 2021. He moved himself and Telegram to Dubai in 2017 and, according to French media, he also took United Arab Emirates citizenship. He was reported to be a citizen of the Caribbean island nation of St Kitts and Nevis as well.
Russia started blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order to enable state security services to access encrypted messages of its users.
The action interrupted many services, but had little effect on the availability of Telegram in the country. The ban order, however, sparked mass protests in Moscow and criticism from NGOs.
The Russian foreign ministry recalled those protests as it called on Western NGOs to demand his release in France.
Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s representative to international organisations in Vienna, accused France of acting as a dictatorship – the same criticism that Moscow faced when putting demands on Mr Durov in 2014 and trying to ban Telegram in 2018.
“Some naive persons still do not understand that if they play more or less a visible role in international information space it’s not safe for them to visit countries which move towards much more totalitarian societies,” Mr Ulyanov wrote on X.
Former president Dmitry Medvedev said Mr Durov miscalculated by fleeing Russia and thinking that he would never have to cooperate with the security services abroad.
Mr Medvedev related a conversation he had with Mr Durov several years ago in which the former president told him that if he did not want to cooperate with law enforcement agencies then he would have problems in any country.
Mr Medvedev, the powerful deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, said Mr Durov wanted to be a brilliant “man of the world” who lived wonderfully without a motherland.
“Durov should finally realise one cannot chose one’s the fatherland,” he said.
Telegram didn’t immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. France’s interior ministry and police had no comment.
Telegram, which has nearly a billion users, is influential in Russia, Ukraine and former republics of the Soviet Union.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in Februray 2022, Telegram has become the main source of unfiltered, and sometimes graphic and misleading, content from both sides about the war and the politics of the conflict.
The app has come to be described as “a virtual battlefield” for the war, used heavily by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his officials as well as the Russian government.
Mr Durov, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes at $15.5bn, said certain governments had tried putting pressure on him, but he would keep the app a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.
Telegram’s increasing popularity has prompted scrutiny from several countries in Europe, including France, which claim to have security and data breach concerns regarding the app.
Mr Durov’s arrest by French police drew condemnation from prominent free speech advocates. “It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme,” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, said, referring to the fellow tech CEO’s detention.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, who abandoned his campaign for US president on Friday and endorsed Donald Trump, said on X that the need to protect free speech “has never been more urgent.”
Several Russian bloggers called for protests at French embassies throughout the world at noon on Sunday.
The Russian embassy in France demanded consular access to Mr Durov and said his rights must be ensured, state news agency TASS reported on Sunday.
The embassy said France had so far “avoided engagement” on the situation with Mr Durov and that Russian diplomats were in contact with the CEO’s lawyer.
