Telegram founder Pavel Durov has commented on the anniversary of his arrest by French police in Paris. He said the arrest was «legally and logically absurd» and that he would rather die than give unauthorized access to his Telegram messages.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov has commented on the anniversary of his arrest by French police in Paris. He said the arrest was «legally and logically absurd» and that he would rather die than give unauthorized access to his Telegram messages.
«A year ago, the French police detained me for 4 days because some people I had never heard of were using Telegram to coordinate crimes. The arrest of the CEO of a major platform because of the actions of its users was not only unprecedented — it was legally and logically absurd,» Durov wrote on the social network X (Twitter).
The founder of the Telegram messenger , Pavel Durov, was detained in France after his private plane landed at Le Bourget airport near Paris on August 24, 2024. He was accused of deliberately failing to moderate illegal content on the messenger.
«A year later, the ‘criminal investigation’ against me is still trying to find something that I or Telegram did wrong. Our moderation practices meet industry standards, and Telegram has always responded to all legally binding requests from France,» Pavel Durov wrote on August 24, 2025.
According to French journalists' sources in law enforcement agencies, Durov did not expect to be detained last year and during his first interrogations with the police he behaved irritablely and arrogantly. He flaunted his connections, claiming that he had come to Paris to meet with Emmanuel Macron.
Now the Telegram founder claims that he was arrested because of a mistake by the French police themselves, saying that until August 2024 they «ignored French and EU laws and did not send any requests to Telegram» in the manner prescribed by law. «They could have learned about the correct procedure by simply Googling or asking,» Durov noted in a series of posts on X (Twitter).
He said he is still forced to return to France every 14 days and «no appeal date is in sight.»
«So far, the only consequence of my arrest has been the enormous damage done to the image of France as a free country. One thing is certain: we will continue the fight — and we will win,» the Telegram founder claims.
In the comments to his posts, one user asked: «Didn’t you give them [law enforcement] a backdoor?» To which Pavel Durov replied that he would rather die, and that no third party has access to private messages on Telegram.
Last year, French law enforcement officials said that the Telegram messenger ignored their requests, but after Durov’s arrest, the platform changed its strategy and began «unprecedented cooperation» on all requests.
According to the French publication France Info, Telegram transferred the data of more than 10,000 users to law enforcement agencies in various countries between August and September 2024. During this period, the messenger satisfied all requests from the French Office for the Combating the Exploitation of Minors (Ofmin), although the company had previously ignored similar requests.
