French authorities issued arrest warrants for Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and his co-founder brother Nikolai back in March. This was reported by POLITICO, according to UNN.
"French authorities issued arrest warrants for Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and his co-founder brother Nikolai in March. The French undercover investigation of Telegram is broader and began several months earlier than previously known. The case concerns Telegram's refusal to cooperate with a French police investigation into child sexual abuse," the newspaper writes.
It is noted that the arrest of Durov provoked a diplomatic storm for the French government, as well as global outrage over freedom of speech and the culpability of social media platforms for the materials distributed by their users.
"The arrest warrants were issued after the messaging platform 'failed to respond' to a previous court request to identify the Telegram user. It also emphasizes Telegram's "almost complete lack of cooperation" with both French and European authorities in other cases. The warrants for Pavel and his brother Nikolai, a co-founder of the platform, were issued on March 25 on charges including "complicity in the possession, distribution, offering or provision of pornographic images of minors as part of an organized group," the newspaper adds.
Nikolai Durov's current whereabouts are unknown.
For reference
Nikolai Durov was the lead developer of the VK team until 2013. Together with his brother Pavel, he founded the Telegram messenger and developed the MTProto protocol for Telegram in 2013.
He also served as a senior researcher at the Algebra Laboratory of the St. Petersburg Department of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Recall
On August 24, Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the Telegram messenger, was detained on Saturday evening at Le Bourget airport near Paris. The detention took place at around 20:00 after Durov stepped off a private plane arriving from Azerbaijan.
On August 26, a Paris court extended the detention of Telegram founder Pavel Durov to 96 hours.