Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov is due to appear in court in the coming days after being arrested by French police at an airport near Paris for alleged offences related to his popular messaging app, sources told AFP.
The Franco-Russian billionaire, 39, was detained at Le Bourget airport north of the French capital on Saturday evening, one of the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Durov had arrived from Baku, in Azerbaijan, on a private plane.
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 of the sources said.
Durov is accused of failing to take action to curb the criminal use of his platform. If found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in jail.
"Enough of Telegram's impunity," said one of the investigators, adding they were surprised Durov came to Paris knowing he was a wanted man.
Durov: Mysterious and controversial Telegram founder
Refusal to cooperate
Russian authorities said they had demanded access to Durov but had 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.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow had asked for consular access to Durov, saying that as he also had French citizenship "France considers that it is his main nationality".
Maria Butina, a lawmaker for the ruling United Russia party, said on Sunday that Durov's arrest was part of a witch-hunt that means freedom of speech is now "dead" in Europe.
"Pavel Durov is a political prisoner - a victim of a witch-hunt by the West," Butina told Reuters.
Butina said that she believed Durov had been arrested in an attempt by the West to gain control of Telegram, which is influential and widely used in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union.
"Now basically they have a hostage and they will try to blackmail Russia, they will try to blackmail all the users of Telegram and not only try to get control but also try to block the network here in Russia," she said.
Platform of 'privacy'
Telegram was founded by Durov and his brother in the wake of the Russian government’s crackdown after mass pro-democracy protests that rocked Moscow at the end of 2011 and 2012.
The encrypted messaging app, based in Dubai, has positioned itself as an alternative to US-owned platforms, which have been criticised for their commercial exploitation of users' personal data.
Telegram has committed to never disclosing any information about its users.
In a rare interview given to right-wing talk show 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 when 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.
Circuiting moderation laws
By basing itself in the United Arab Emirates, Telegram has been able to shield 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, as well as for users to disseminate neo-Nazi, paedophilic, conspiratorial and terrorist content.
Competitor messaging service WhatsApp introduced worldwide limits on message forwarding in 2019 after it was accused of enabling the spread of false information in India that led to lynchings.
(with newswires)
