Telegram founder Patel Durov charged with alleged criminal activities in the app

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is banned from leaving French territory after being accused of complicity in operating an online platform that allegedly facilitated the distribution of sexual images of children, leaving the future of the messaging app that has become one of the world’s largest social media platforms uncertain.

Durov was arrested at 8 p.m. local time on Saturday after his private jet landed at an airport near Paris. He was then detained for around 96 hours – the maximum length of time a person can be held without charge under French law – as part of an investigation into alleged criminal activity on Telegram. He was charged on Wednesday evening local time and banned from leaving the country, the Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement. He was released under judicial supervision, the spokesman said, without explaining what that meant.

The Telegram founder is being investigated on a number of charges related to material on child sexual abuse, drug trafficking and hate crimes on the Internet. He is also lacking cooperation with the French authorities, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said on Wednesday.

“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the misuse of that platform,” Telegram said on Sunday before Durov was charged. The platform, which has 900 million active users, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations.

Since his arrest, both the United Arab Emirates and Russia have requested consular access to Durov, who holds citizenship of both countries. It is unclear why Durov, who also received a French passport after leaving Russia, was in France. “I am not on vacation,” he said on his Telegram channel in June.

Russia claims without evidence that Durov’s arrest is an attempt by the US to exert influence on the platform through France. “Telegram is one of the few and largest Internet platforms over which the US has no influence,” Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the Russian State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, said on the app.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that Durov’s detention was “in no way a political decision.” “It is the task of the judiciary to enforce the law in complete independence,” he added in a post on X. The European Commission told WIRED that the arrest was made under French criminal law and was not related to the new European regulation for tech platforms. “We are closely monitoring developments related to Telegram and are ready to cooperate with the French authorities should this be relevant,” said a spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous.

Durov, once known as the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia, said he got the idea for Telegram while he was still CEO of Vkontakte, the Russian social media company he founded in 2006. Under his leadership, the platform was dogged by allegations that it shared data with the Kremlin, although Durov appeared to publicly clash with Russian authorities over the political content VKontakte hosted. He told The New York Times that when a SWAT team showed up at his St. Petersburg home in 2011, he realized he wanted to contact his brother but had no secure way to do so. “That’s how Telegram started,” he said.