2024-08-25 10:55:00
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is due to appear in court this Sunday, the day after his arrest at a Paris airport. The arrest follows a search warrant issued against him by French investigators for various violations of his encrypted messaging service. The Paris prosecutor’s office, contacted several times by AFP, refused to provide any information on Sunday morning. “as it stands, concerning a procedure followed in the investigation”The Interior Ministry and the Paris police chief also did not comment, as did Telegram.
Accompanied by his bodyguard and his assistant who follow him constantly, the 39-year-old Franco-Russian billionaire was arrested Saturday evening in the Bourget airport terminal, north of Paris, a source close to the case told AFP. Pavel Durov was apprehended around 8 p.m. as he got off his private jet, added the television channel TF1. The founder of Telegram was coming from Baku (Azerbaijan) and was due to spend at least the evening in Paris where he had planned to have dinner, added a source close to the investigation.
“Enough of Telegram’s impunity,” said one of the investigators, surprised that the billionaire, knowing that he was wanted in France, had decided to come to Paris anyway. “Perhaps out of a sense of impunity,” said one of the sources close to the case.
The Office for Combating Violence against Minors (Ofmin) had issued a search warrant against Pavel Durov as the coordinating department of a preliminary investigation for offenses ranging from fraud to drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime, advocacy of terrorism and fraud, explained one of the sources close to the case. The justice system accuses Pavel Durov of not taking action against the criminal uses of his messaging service by his subscribers, in particular through a lack of moderation and collaboration with investigators.
With its discussion groups that can accommodate up to 200,000 people, the messaging service is sometimes accused of increasing the viral potential of false information and the proliferation of hateful, neo-Nazi, pedophile, conspiracy or terrorist content.
Moscow and Musk call for freedom of expression
The arrest of Pavel Durov has sparked numerous international reactions. « #FreePavel »published on X (ex-Twitter) the boss of the platform, Elon Musk, before publishing a new message in French saying “Freedom. Freedom! Freedom?”.
Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who has just rallied to Donald Trump, told X that “The need to protect freedom of expression has never been more urgent”.
In Russia, where Telegram is one of the most widely used social networks with channels that can have several hundred thousand subscribers, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that “The Russian Embassy in Paris immediately got to work, as is customary.” in case of detention of Russian citizens abroad.
She also recalled that many international NGOs had condemned in 2018 the decision of a Russian court to block Telegram, a decision never fully implemented. “Do you think that this time they will call for Durov’s release, or will they keep quiet?”she asked on her Telegram page.
The Russian embassy in France, for its part, denounced on X the lack of cooperation from the French authorities and announced that it was in contact with Pavel Durov’s lawyer: “After the news of PV Durov’s detention appeared in the media, we immediately asked the French authorities for clarification on the reasons for his detention and demanded that his rights be protected and that he be granted consular access. To this day, the French side still refuses to cooperate on this issue.”
Privacy advocate
The online messaging service launched in 2013 by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai, on which communications can be encrypted from end to end and whose headquarters are in Dubai, has positioned itself against the grain of American platforms, criticized for their commercial exploitation of personal data. Telegram has notably committed to never revealing information about its users.
A champion of privacy, Pavel Durov said in a rare interview in April that he had the idea to launch an encrypted messaging service after being pressured by Russian authorities at the time of VK, a social network he created in his home country before selling it and leaving Russia in 2014. He said he then tried to set up in Berlin, London, Singapore and San Francisco before opting for Dubai, where he praised the business environment and the “neutrality”.
“I think we’re doing a good job with Telegram, with 900 million users that will probably exceed 1 billion monthly active users within a year,” he said.
In the Gulf emirate, Telegram has protected itself from state moderation rules, at a time when both the European Union and the United States are putting pressure on major platforms to remove illegal content.
(With agencies)
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