Over more than a decade, the founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram has amassed various different citizenships, something that's only added to the mystery surrounding his detention in France.
Those passports provided Pavel Durov protection after he created and ran Telegram as a self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist. The app has been used by some to plan protests in repressive governments like in Iran and his native Russia. However, Western governments allege Telegram aided the work of drug traffickers, money launderers, militant groups and child pornographers.
"To be truly free, you should be ready to risk everything for freedom," Durov once wrote on Instagram, interspersed between images of himself shirtless with the skyscrapers of Dubai or the ruins of Mada'in Saleh in Saudi Arabia behind him.
That risk now appears to have caught up with him, despite passports from Russia, France, the United Arab Emirates, and Saint Kitts and Nevis, and his wealth, estimated by Forbes to b
