TEMPO.CO, Paris - Pavel Durov, the Russian-French billionaire founder and CEO of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, August 24, 2024, TF1 TV and BFM TV reported, as quoted by Reuters.

Pavel Durov was traveling on his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding that he had been the subject of an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.

TF1 and BFM both said the investigation focused on the lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police believed this allowed criminal activity to continue unhindered on the messaging app.

Durov faces possible charges on Sunday, according to French media.

Telegram, which has nearly a billion users, is highly influential in Russia, Ukraine and former Soviet republics. It is ranked as one of the top social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat. Telegram did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The French Interior Ministry and police did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Russian-born Durov founded Telegram with his brother in 2013. He left Russia in 2014 after refusing to comply with government demands to shut down opposition communities on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold.

“I prefer being free to taking orders from anyone,” Durov told US journalist Tucker Carlson in April of his departure from Russia and the search for a headquarters for his company that included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Telegram has become a major source of unfiltered — and sometimes vulgar and misleading — content from both sides about the war and the politics surrounding the conflict.

The platform has become what some analysts have called a “virtual battlefield” for the war, used heavily by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his officials, as well as the Russian government.

Telegram – which allows users to bypass official surveillance – has also become one of the few places where Russians can access independent news about the war after the Kremlin stepped up restrictions on independent media following its invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s foreign ministry said its embassy in Paris was clarifying the situation around Durov and called on Western nongovernmental organizations to demand his release.

Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order to give state security services access to its users’ encrypted messages.

The move disrupted many third-party services but had little impact on Telegram’s availability there. Still, the blocking order sparked mass protests in Moscow and criticism from NGOs.

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TF1 said Durov, who lives in Dubai, had traveled from Azerbaijan and was arrested at around 8 p.m. (18:00 GMT). Durov, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes at $15.5 billion, said governments had tried to pressure him but that the app should remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics.”

Telegram’s growing popularity, however, has prompted scrutiny from some European countries, including France, over security and data breaches.

Russia’s representative to international organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, and several other Russian politicians accused France of acting like a dictatorship on Sunday — the same criticism Moscow faced when it sued Durov in 2014 and tried to ban Telegram in 2018.

“Some naive people still do not understand that if they play a more or less visible role in the international information space, it is not safe for them to visit countries that are moving towards a much more totalitarian society,” Ulyanov wrote on X.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, said after the report of Durov’s detention: “It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking memes.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who on Friday dropped out of his US presidential campaign and endorsed Republican Donald Trump, said on X after the report that the need to protect free speech “has never been more urgent.”

Some Russian bloggers called for protests at French embassies around the world at noon on Sunday.

ERWIN PRIMA

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