Telegram messaging app founder and CEO Pavel Durov has reportedly been arrested at a French airport after stepping off private plane.
Police swooped on the billionaire shortly after landing at the Bourget airport, outside Paris, following a flight from Azerbaijan, French outlet TF1 info reported, citing an unnamed source.
Durov was travelling aboard his private jet and had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France, the news site added.
The 39-year-old tech tycoon was reportedly arrested at around 8pm local time while accompanied by his bodyguard.
Despite being born in Russia, Durov has not lived there since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas area of Ukraine in 2014.
Durov now lives in Dubai where Telegram is based and holds dual citizenship of both France and the United Arab Emirates.
He was quoted by TechCrunch in 2014 as saying: ‘I don’t have any business in Russia and have no plans to return there. I have no Russian citizenship anymore.’
Durov Founded the app in 2013 along with his brother Nikolai. It now has 950 million active users who can send messages, photos and videos, take part in chats for groups of up to 200,000 people and broadcast to unlimited audiences.
Intended as a rival to WhatsApp, Telegram users can have ‘secret chats’, in which messages are stored on devices rather than the cloud, and messages can also be set to self-destruct after a certain time period.
Mr Durov who is estimated to be worth around £12 billion, said in an interview earlier this year Telegram would remain a ‘neutral platform’ and not a ‘player in geopolitics.’
But the UK government has insisted social media companies such as Telegram must do more to stop extremists using their services for criminal means.
The campaigning organisation Counter Extremism Project said Telegram has taken some action to reduce the use of its platform by terrorists but commented on its website ‘it is clear that more can and should be done.’