Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, has reportedly been arrested at a French airport after disembarking from a private jet.
Police attacked the billionaire shortly after he landed at Bourget airport, outside Paris, after he left Azerbaijan, French media TF1 info reported, citing an anonymous source.
Durov was on board his private jet and there was an arrest warrant out for him in France, the news site said.
The 39-year-old tech mogul was reportedly arrested around 8pm local time, accompanied by his bodyguard.
Telegram messaging app founder and CEO Pavel Durov has reportedly been arrested at a French airport after disembarking from a private jet
Durov founded the app in 2013 together with his brother Nikolai (Stock photo)
Although Durov was born in Russia, he has not lived there since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014.
Durov now lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based, and holds dual citizenship in both France and the United Arab Emirates.
He was quoted by TechCrunch in 2014 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. The app now has 950 million active users who can send messages, photos and videos, participate in group chats of up to 200,000 people and broadcast to an unlimited audience.
Telegram is intended to compete with WhatsApp and offers users the ability to have “secret chats,” where messages are stored on devices rather than in the cloud. Messages can also be set to automatically destroy after a certain time.
Mr Durov, whose fortune is estimated at around £12 billion, said in an interview earlier this year that Telegram would remain a “neutral platform” and not a “player in geopolitics”.
However, the UK government is demanding that social media companies such as Telegram do more to prevent extremists from using their services for criminal purposes.
Campaign organization Counter Extremism Project said Telegram had taken steps to curb the use of its platform by terrorists, but said on its website that “it is clear that more can and must be done.”