Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, has been arrested at Le Bourget airport near Paris. It happened on Saturday 24 August at around 20:00, the French TV channel TF1 reports.

The businessman, who is of Russian origin and holds French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was accompanied by a bodyguard and a woman. According to journalists, when Durov arrived in the country on a private plane from Azerbaijan, he was detained on the runway by the air transport gendarmerie on a warrant issued by the French National Criminal Investigation Department on the basis of a preliminary investigation.

Among the charges that could be officially brought against Durov as early as this Sunday: complicity in drug trafficking, crimes against children, and fraud due to the lack of moderation on Telegram.

"Pavel Durov will end up in pre-trial detention, that's for sure," the investigator in charge of the case told journalists from the TF1 TV channel.

On Sunday morning, Telegram's press service did not comment on Durov's arrest.

Telegram in Ukraine

  • Telegram is one of the most popular messengers in Ukraine, with a global audience of 800 million users. The messenger was launched in 2013 by Russian billionaire Pavel Durov, who previously served as CEO of the now-banned social network VKontakte.
  • In Ukraine, the security of the messenger has long been in dispute. Ukrainian businessman Yaroslav Azhnyuk, a consistent critic of Telegram, drew attention to the application's security risks in a commentary for AIN. One of them is a failure in "Runet", which caused Telegram to stop working in almost all of Europe and partially in the USA.
  • Telegram recently  blocked a number of Ukrainian bots that could be used to report on the actions of the Russian occupiers. But on the same day it  unblocked them. In a comment to Reuters, a representative of the messenger said that the bots were 'temporarily disabled due to a malfunction, but were later restored', without giving further details.
  • Later, the National Council for Television and Radio Broadcasting of Ukraine called for an end to official state communication on Telegram. And Ukrainian developers proposed the creation of a secure service "Diia.Kanaly" as an alternative to Telegram for officials and authorities.
  • Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the National Security Council of Ukraine, called the messenger "very dangerous and vulnerable", while Andriy Yusov, a representative of the State Security Service, said that the threats posed by Telegram were indeed real.