Telegram messaging app founder and CEO Pavel Durov has reportedly been arrested at a French airport after getting off a private jet.
Police attacked the billionaire shortly after he landed at Bourget airport outside Paris following a flight from Azerbaijan, French outlet TF1 info reported, citing an unnamed source.
Durov was travelling on board his private jet and had been the subject of an arrest warrant in France, the news site added.
The 39-year-old tech mogul was reportedly arrested at around 8 p.m. local time while accompanied by his bodyguard.
Telegram messaging app founder and CEO Pavel Durov has reportedly been arrested at a French airport after getting off a private jet.
Durov founded the app in 2013 together with his brother Nikolai (file image)
Despite being born in Russia, Durov has not lived there since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbass region of Ukraine in 2014.
Durov now lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based, and has dual citizenship, French and UAE.
In 2014, TechCrunch quoted him as saying: “I have no business in Russia and no plans to return there. I no longer have Russian citizenship.”
Durov founded the app in 2013 with his brother Nikolai. It now has 950 million active users who can send messages, photos and videos, participate in group chats for up to 200,000 people and broadcast to an unlimited number of audiences.
Intended as a rival to WhatsApp, Telegram users can have “secret chats,” where messages are stored on devices rather than in the cloud, and can also be set to self-destruct after a certain period of time.
Durov, whose net worth is estimated at £12bn, said in an interview earlier this year that Telegram would remain a “neutral platform” and not an “actor in geopolitics”.
But the UK government has insisted that social media companies such as Telegram must do more to stop extremists using their services for criminal purposes.
Campaign group Counter Extremism Project said Telegram has taken some steps to reduce terrorist use of its platform, but commented on its website that “it is clear that more can and should be done.”
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