Paris, Sept. 6, (dpa/GNA) – The founder of the messaging service Telegram, Pavel Durov, has made his first statement after his arrest in Paris last month.
In a long post on his own Telegram channel late Thursday, he rejected the French authorities’ accusations that the service does not respond to requests from official bodies.
“Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests,” he wrote.
The 39-year-old French citizen is free on bail but is not allowed to leave the country.
Investigators in Paris accuse Durov of insufficiently cooperating with authorities in criminal investigations. He was arrested at a Paris area airport on August 25.
He is suspected of being complicit in drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud and several child abuse-related offences due to a failure to take action to limit the criminal use of his platform and a lack of cooperation with authorities.
Durov criticized the French authorities for how they approached the case, saying that “using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.”
“The claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day … We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster,” he wrote.
“I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram — and the social networking industry as a whole — safer and stronger.”