Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of popular messaging app, Telegram Pavel Durov was arrested by French police at an airport north of Paris on Saturday.
Mr Durov was detained after his private jet had landed at Le Bourget Airport, French media reported.
According to officials the 39-year-old had been arrested under a warrant for offences related to the popular messaging app.
Russia’s embassy in France is taking “immediate steps” to clarify the situation, according to Russia’s TASS state news agency.
Durov had been travelling on his private jet, French TV channel TF1 said on its website.
Telegram was initially popular in Russia, Ukraine and former Soviet Union states, until recently when it became a platform for launching of mini apps for gaming and crypyocurrency mining. At least, up to one billion people around the world now use Telegram for playing cryptocurrency related tap-to-earn games, such as Tapswap, Hamster Kombat, W-Coin and many others after a cryptocurrency project called Notcoin debuted on Telegram late 2023.
The app was banned in Russia in 2018, after a previous refusal by Durov to hand over user data but, the ban was reversed in 2021.
Telegram is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and Wechat.
Mr Durov founded Telegram in 2013 and 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.
